Category: Exclusive to COTW

DIARIES & MEMOIRS: COUNTRIES A-Z, Exclusive to COTW, Reflections, Ukraine

Dancing During War (Ukraine travel memoir) #2: Wednesday August 14, 2024

!Epic Tomorrows

by Keith Hennessey, 2024

I came to Ukraine because I hate war and imperialism and wanted to extend solidarity to people suffering from it. Also I’m deeply curious about, and inspired by, how people, and artists in particular, think-feel-work-dance-heal-create-connect under extremely difficult conditions. How to survive a war? How to keep dancing, or not, during a war? From previous experiences* and extensive political reading I know that witnessing is a powerful act of solidarity. I came to listen and look, with a willingness to be changed and a commitment to not turn away, not be silent. I was sincerely invited and warmly welcomed.

I also came because I’m restless and confused with my own life which teeters between fabulous, and lonely alienated political despair. With the overly scheduled and distracted attention of my everyday life I don’t have the capacity to focus or learn at the level I’d like to be engaged, at the level I have found only when I leave home and immerse myself in a place and a history with the people most impacted.

I also came because it was easier, logistically and culturally, than going to Sudan, Palestine, Venezuela, or Congo, where I am also interested in learning, witnessing and offering solidarity. In early August 2024 I had paid work relatively nearby in Vienna and I had been to Kyiv before the 2022 invasion and knew some Ukrainian dancers. Karl Frost, a dancer friend, had made the trip a few months earlier to offer contact improvisation (CI) workshops in Kyiv and Lviv. Karl connected me with Lilia, a dancer-organizer from Lviv who organized a talk, classes, and dance jams around my visit. I declined invitations to go to Kyiv because the trip is long and the likelihood of bombing and regular air raid sirens was much higher.

In discussing what I might offer in this situation, Lilia said, “we’re trying to hold together a dance community during the war, to keep our love and humanity alive.”

I responded:
“I am not a therapist or trauma specialist but I recognize the healing or calming potential of the practices we do in a dance class, in somatic awareness exercises, in paying close attention to our breath and body sensations, in tuning in to another person or group. Most healing focuses on the individual. I am more interested in “political healing,” which recognizes how we share many symptoms (anxiety, depression, alienation) with other people (and other beings) and that our pain/harm is caused by social and political forces more than by isolated individuals. My work tends more to the whole forest than to the individual tree.”

Lilia responded:
“Dear Keith, First of all I appreciate your desire to come and teach in Ukraine. For us it’s very important when people abroad would like to come and to spend some time in Ukraine. To see how we keep on living and keep on dancing in this crazy world. In a war world full of violence, anger and horrible things around, somehow we choose to love, to be kind and to be honest with each other. It is a miracle for me. How is it possible in these hard circumstances to choose the humanity? We are living in the high risk right now. It’s a revolutionary world. For me CI practice is kind of the same revolutionary dance form with a high risk and a strong survival mode.

CI practice is supporting our nervous system and is helping to survive our body both physically and mentally. In your workshop in Ukraine, Keith, I’d like to experience how the physicality of CI practice meets our Ukrainian context. Through the CI exercises focused on physicality and gravity. Through the scores and performative structures. How the Russian war changed us and keeps on changing. How the political and social forces change us. How do we meet these changes? How open are we to speak and to dance with complicated things in our lives — like war for Ukrainians and like women`s rights, queer rights and so on? We have done it every day since 24.02.2022. I think we are ready for that risk — putting seeds and uncomfortable questions. We are in survival mode.

I trust you as a CI teacher and I trust your experience. We are not expecting something big from you. We are inviting you to come and dance with us and to share your experience. This is enough. Your active solidarity position is a key. And of course we’ll be healing together while gathering and doing simple CI things but risky
physical things related to the survival mode.”

Due to the ongoing war employing drones and air missiles there were no commercial flights into Ukraine. I flew to Krakow Poland were I had a lovely day of rest, and enjoyed 2nd hand shopping, hipster ramen**, and the hotel spa. Then I took a 7-hour FlixBus to Lviv. I’d heard that the border was unpredictable and we could be there for hours. I was imagining a more militarized situation… maybe like an Israeli checkpoint but it was just slow bureaucracy, not malevolent. Fortunately I had packed a lot of food.

My host Lilia, a dancer, organizer, and mother of two small kids, met me at the station. We hugged warmly despite never having met before. She told me that when she texted me that morning she wondered if I would really come, imagining that I might cancel at the last minute. In the taxi Lilia tried to explain the destabilizing and exhausting unpredictability of the Ukrainian situation. She said they no longer had any concept of the future. She went to a CI festival in Austria last year and observed that people who seem to know their future feel plastic to her after 3 years of war. I asked, plastic? She explained, “They walk around oblivious like plastic people who can count on their future unfolding in a predetermined way.” While in Ukraine I heard many versions of this feeling of alienation or critical distance from people who are not also living with war as a daily reality or who act as if a war at the border of Eastern Europe and Russia doesn’t concern them.

On my first walk around the city center, with its multiple cathedrals and churches over 300 years old, and quaint cobblestone streets lined with vibrant and crowded outdoor cafes, I saw the first visible sign of war. A church with protective covers on its stained glass windows and historic sculptures. After dinner I came upon a street musician who had a large audience of over 100 people, mostly in their teens and 20s. I was attracted by what sounded like a singalong, choral singing. Later I played the recording for someone to ask about the song and learned that it was a pop Ukrainian song from the 90s that many people know. There’s a curfew for everyone at midnight, which I appreciated because here in the dense city center there are many busy cafes, restaurants, bars, and ice cream shops just outside my window.

*My previous war and conflict experiences: Bosnia and Croatia in 1995, Chiapas after the 1997 Acteal massacre perpetrated by paramilitaries against the indigenous Zapatistas, Cairo after the 2011 uprisings, Oslo during and Bratislava following anti-gay shootings in 2022 and 2023.
**Not sure why this is turning into an Eastern Europe ramen tour but for reference, the ramen restaurants in Vienna are cheaper than SF, cheaper in Krakow than in Vienna, and cheaper again in Lviv compared to Krakow. In Lviv a dinner-size bowl of delicious ramen in a trendy spot is US$5-7. I 💜 ramen.

DIARIES & MEMOIRS: COUNTRIES A-Z, Exclusive to COTW, Letters to the editors, Popular & established authors, South Korea

Letter from Jo Eun Young to Matthew, COTW editor

!Epic Tomorrows

Dear Matthew,

I hope you have been doing well.

After returning from Europe, I took about a week to recover from jet lag and regain my energy.

For this journey, I printed fifty copies of our leaflet, and I was able to leave forty-eight of them at bookshops along the way.

My first stop was the conference in Siena, where I shared the leaflet with professors and several students in Korean Studies. They were genuinely interested, especially in the translations, and I promised to send them the original Korean poems after returning home.

After Siena, I visited Florence and Rome. The experience was quite different from my visit to Lisbon in 2019.

In Lisbon, I felt warmly welcomed. Perhaps it was because Fernando Pessoa is celebrated throughout the city, with bookstores and shops proudly displaying books and souvenirs inspired by him. It felt like a city that embraces its poets.

Florence and Rome, however, felt different. After returning home, I found myself reflecting on why.

First, Florence and Rome are much more tourism-oriented cities than Lisbon. Perhaps people naturally saw me as a tourist rather than as a writer.

Second, I wondered whether my limited English, together with being an Asian visitor, made communication more difficult.

Third, many of the bookshops I visited also operated as cafés, restaurants, or bars, which may have made it less practical for them to introduce or display independent literary projects.

Because the leaflet was written in English, one bookseller—who I believe was probably a staff member rather than the owner—suggested that I should instead visit bookshops specializing in English-language books.

In Florence, every bookshop kindly accepted my leaflet. In Rome, one bookshop politely declined. It appeared to be one of the busiest bookstores in the neighborhood, and the staff explained that any decision to display printed materials had to be discussed and approved at a staff meeting.

I cannot say that I was enthusiastically welcomed everywhere, but I also realize that this expectation was my own. If even one person becomes interested and a genuine connection begins, I will consider this journey worthwhile.

Most importantly, this small adventure was meaningful because I was able to share a leaflet that we created together—you, the illustrator Han So-jin, and I. Thanks to this project, I wandered far beyond the usual tourist destinations and explored the small streets and independent bookshops of Florence and Rome.

Back in Korea, I am currently teaching as a professor while also working with a local cultural foundation on a project interviewing independent neighborhood bookshops. Looking back, from March through August, I have been on a continuous journey through local bookshops in both Korea and Europe.

Thank you, Matthew, for accompanying me on this journey through your work and encouragement.

Now many projects are waiting for me again.

I hope to spend this summer working, reading, writing, and loving.

With my sincere gratitude,

JO EUN YOUNG

P.S.

I’ve been documenting this journey on my Instagram (@bella_joeun), if you’re interested.

DIARIES & MEMOIRS: COUNTRIES A-Z, Exclusive to COTW, Reflections, Ukraine

Dancing During War (Ukraine travel memoir) #1

!Epic Tomorrows

by Keith Hennessey, 2024

This is a serialized travel memoir from a well-intentioned yet ill-informed US/Canadian perspective that shares stories of fierce vulnerable Ukrainian dancers in the middle of a war/invasion. This isn’t well researched journalism. Yes you can share with friends —Keith

*******

Dear reader,

This is a 5-day collection of stories, observations, and experiences from my trip to Lviv, Ukraine in August 2024. 2024 was year 3 or 10 or 30 or 100 of the war between Russia and Ukraine, also known as, Ukraine’s righteous defense against Russia’s colonial invasion, depending on which historical date or “truth” you want to prioritize. Numbers of people killed and other data are based on what I could find online in summer 2024.

First, some historical dates to explain the above numbers, 3, 10, 30, 100:

1921-22: (100 years ago.) Russia, as part of Soviet expansion, invaded and annexed/occupied Ukraine, including a violent suppression of Ukrainian literature, culture, and language.

1932-33: In the violent take-over (forced nationalization) of Ukraine’s vast and fertile private farms, Stalin’s regime caused the Holodomar/Terror-Famine, an agricultural genocide that resulted in at least 4 million Ukrainian deaths. Followed by massive displacement, both internally and by emigration.

Nov 1989: Fall of the Berlin Wall and the beginning of dissolution of Russian-dominated Soviet Union.

Aug 1991: (30 years ago.) Ukrainian independence, and intensification of Russian efforts to control and/or destabilize Ukraine, to keep Ukraine within the Russian sphere of economic, military, and cultural influence. The US and Europe have been very active in this larger global competition, pulling Ukraine away from Russia towards Europe, maybe with promises to join Europe (and maybe even NATO?)

Feb 2014: Maidan Revolution / Revolution of Dignity, culmination of the Euromaidan protests (2013-14), which ousted Ukraine’s pro-Russian president.

2014: (10 years ago.) In response to the Maidan Revolution, Putin’s Russia invaded Ukraine’s Donbas region and then annexed Crimea. There has been an ongoing war in Eastern Ukraine since then, which Russia escalated in 2022. Ukraine re-prioritized Ukrainian language education in and out of schools.

Feb 2022: (3 years ago.) The current Russian invasion of Ukraine, occupying significant areas of Eastern Ukraine, ongoing bombing of civilian infrastructure in several areas of the country including the capital Kyev. An unknown number of thousands of Ukrainian civilians dead, estimates of over 100,000 military dead, and over 8 million Ukrainians have fled the country from a population of 41 million. Russian military deaths have not been clearly reported but it seems that over 100,000 have died.

*******

Through a friend I reached out to a couple of Ukrainian contact improvisation dancer-organizers saying I’d heard that there was a desire for international teachers to come to Ukraine, to share skills, witness life during war, and soften some of the isolation they have felt since 2022. A small festival was organized around my visit which included a talk, 3 days of classes and dance jams, an informal performance, and a closing hang out at a semi-rural sauna/banya. Over 50 people participated, from several cities and towns around Ukraine including Lviv, Kyiv, Odessa, Dnipro and Kharkiv, with 25-40 people at each class, talk, jam, performance.

These notes are intended as both a curious travelog for my friends and as a small act of solidarity with Ukrainian dancers feeling isolated, abandoned, and hungry for connection, witness, and support. Writing helps to organize my memories and thoughts and also helps me process what has been a deeply emotional few days. You are witnessing my witnessing.

I do not name all of the people I met and whose stories I’m sharing here. They know I took a lot of notes and photos and consented to my sharing this report with friends and beyond. They also have access to the document and know that I welcome their comments, corrections, edits. Neither my notes nor memories are precise or complete. I heard almost everything through translation and gaps of cultural understanding. I selected what to share. Any historical info was grabbed from Wikipedia and quick internet searches simply to create a broader context for the stories I heard. Please do your own research and don’t quote me. Supportive corrections are welcome. All errors, misunderstanding, and omissions are mine. Apologies to all.

At least some of you reading this should consider going to Ukraine.

DIARIES & MEMOIRS: COUNTRIES A-Z, Exclusive to COTW, Reflections

Beyond

!Epic Tomorrows

One of the aspects of an entity having an identity is being able to express it by a code. Whether it liberates or binds its actions is left to perspective. When declaring an entity as identical to another, we are satisfied at evaluating whether one is a replication of the other, but this is seldom sufficient to capture such replication. Idempotence can now step in to eradicate the doubts of variations when we often replay past interactions between entities in angst, asking whether their outcome would be the same. A singular entity should be comprehensible via its expression of Indivisibility, Oneness and Unity. These form such a wonderful trinity where taking the first two together form the pillars of individuality, whereas the third is the expression of a grand final state leagues beyond individuality alone, yet maintaining continuity with everything that comes before.

Such strong forces, each of these attributes describe. When applied to a person, they express themselves as questions. Questions that some might try answering for themselves, over an entire lifetime, only never to reach the semblance of an answer. Some might be tempted to avoid them all together, only to encounter other similar forces forming a boundary that feels almost pre-determined. Whether resulting from external engulfment or emerging from internal undertaking, we cannot escape entification. 

If a country is to be taken as an idealized result of the entification of a People; and a culture, the result of a shared history, the former would have you be one among and the latter would prod you to be one alike. 

However, for a Person, when such questions and forces assert their influence as we endure that endeavor to attain the magnum opus that is Unity, the result is a void that rationality alone cannot diminish.

What comes beyond rationality? Is there, or should there even be such a way of enacting, where it is not rationale alone that drives our actions to fruition? How should one act when the greatest tool that one possesses does not work?

Yet introspecting on such a thought is unmistakably human. The perspective of Humanism so cleanly captures the interactions that drive results when one inevitably finds oneself in the void. We act nevertheless. We act surpassing uncertainty. We act scared, hopeless and trembling in the darkness. We Act.

That is what I have learnt after acting to flood the embedded void within, after leaving my home country and venturing beyond what seems to be —seas, identities, countries and finally Peoples. 

Beyond historical, cultural, socio-economic and political… 

Beyond rational, natural, visceral and real…

There exists us, The Human. 

Sandeep Satish Budhya, Child of The World

Canada, Collapse chats & diaries, Ecology of the absurd, Exclusive to COTW, Reflections

The poetics of Collapse: a new way of expressing our predicament; #1, 1.5 degrees is more than you think, and warming is accelerating

!Epic Tomorrows

HIGHLIGHTS

1. We have practically reached 1.5 degrees of warming already.

2. How can you prepare for a 60 degree heat event? Would you even survive?

3. Your wife or husband may leave you for someone who can keep cooler for longer.

4. Your hypocrisy will feel intolerable, almost to the point of suicide.

5. One day you will scrabble around in the soil as you finally realize what is happening, looking for something cool and reasonable to reassure you.

My dear, dear reader.

Let us discuss the contemporary human predicament, and for now, let us just focus on climate. Moreover, I just want to focus on the 1.5 degree warming limit aimed for by the so-called Paris Agreement. (There was an agreement. It was in Paris. But that is all you need to know. It was useless in curbing the climate catastrophe to any significant degree.)

Some responsible scientists note that we have practically reached 1.5 degrees of warming already, now, in 2026. For example Tad Patzek, Kevin Anderson, Bill McGuire and James Hansen. The conservative consensus of the politically-driven IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) of the United Nations, has proclaimed that 1.5 degrees can only be declared after it has been averaged over 20 years. However, since man-made climate change is probably accelerating (research the scientists above), by the time the 1.5 degree average is declared by the IPCC, global warming will have reached nearer 2 degrees, year on year. And by the time 2 degrees of average global warming is declared, it will actually be nearer 3 degrees, and so on. Do not be lulled into a deathly sleep by the IPCC and the self-serving politicians served by them.

How old will you be in 20 years? It would be prudent to imagine the likely 2 degrees of warming in 2045 and its potential impacts on your life, and it would be prudent to start to prepare now for those impacts, for they will not be slight. Averages of global warming are primarily given for the planet as a whole, but warming over land (where humans live) is always higher than the land-ocean average. A conservative estimate is that 2 degrees of global warming translates to at least 3 degrees of warming over land. Moreover, this warming is not evenly distributed, even over land. Both Europe (where I am from) and Canada (where I live) are warming twice as fast as the global average. So, if you live in these places, (and some select other places) imagine an average of 6 degrees of warming over land, in 2045 (a very reasonable scenario, all things considered). But it gets worse. The bell curve of statistically probable temperatures is shifting towards the hotter end of the spectrum as a whole: this means that rare heat extremes which, for example, due to the current Super El Niño, in Europe are now spiking to around 40 degrees, from an average June high of around 30 degrees, will be several degrees hotter than today. Moreover, as baseline global warming increases, scientists are observing that temperature spikes are increasingly exponentially. So the famous temperature spike of 25 degrees-above-average in Lytton, British Columbia, during the North American heat dome of June 2021, taking the temperature to 49 degrees, if mirrored in 2045 (from a baseline average of 30, instead of 24) could result in an exponentially bigger spike of, for example, 30 degrees, resulting in a 60 degree temperature event. This is not unreasonable conjecture, but is within the likely range of scenarios. Even 55 degrees would be catastrophic enough, I am sure you agree.

How can you prepare for a 60 degree heat event? Would you even survive? Maybe you would if it happened now, but how about when you are twenty years older? And what about your children?

No amount of reasoning can help us now. All I can appeal to, is your greed, and your fear (my greed, my fear) and Heaven help us, our sense of poetry. Centre of the Web is a global platform, but since its readers are so far mostly from so-called developed countries, I aim this post mainly at you.

You will crave after those fond memories of swims in lakes with your family, followed by ice-creams and board games. You will feel compelled to swim in lakes in all seasons, to somehow make yourself tough enough (though you will not really understand why you are doing this), and the board games you play will tend towards the kind that attempt to teach survival skills.

You will, pathetically, be more and more proud of the less and less valuable things you own, and become impressively more strategic in how you plan to sell them. Many of your cutting edge gadgets will cease to function in 50 degrees of heat, as will your shares in the companies that produce such gadgets.

Your wife or husband may leave you for someone who can keep cooler for longer. You must understand, times will become desperate; it is for the sake of your children.

Your liberal-left attitudes towards immigration will harden into hard right attitudes, as the Global South capitalizes on the acclerated warming in the North, engaging in long, drawn-out economic hit-and-runs. Unconsciously, you will sympathize with the raiders. Your hypocrisy will feel intolerable, almost to the point of suicide (and for some, to the point of suicide).

Even when things become hellish, you will attempt to continue with your daily routine, as if nothing extraordinary is happening. You will keep going to the gym despite the extravagent expense and its drain on electricity, and the smashing of gym equipment by local activists. Only the neonazis taking over will finally convince you to renounce your membership. You will only be mildly surprised when your clubcard membership to various other outlets suddenly becomes null and void, on account of the mass bankruptcy of those outlets, due to heat-induced supply chain failures.

Finally, you will be upset, very upset, when your favourite butterfly suddenly goes extinct, in the space of a single season. At this, and only this, you will cry your eyes out….One day you will scrabble around in the soil as you finally realize what is happening, looking for something cool and reasonable to reassure you, to grab onto. You will unearth only an odd piece of plastic, and you will stare at it for an eternity, expressing perfectly how powerless and divorced from nature you feel…

Of course, if you somehow manage to change direction in your life, in an extraordinary way, before all of this unfolds, and if enough other people do the same, a small percentage of these kinds of outcomes may be partly avoidable or subvertable into a less dark kind of poetics, as represented in your thoughts, the stories you tell to yourself and your friends, the posts you post on decrepit social media platforms, and so on. I wish this for you, more than anything in the world. I really, really do.

*******

#WriteCollapse #写社会崩溃 #붕괴에대해쓰다

My name is Matthew Azuley, and I am the founding editor of Centre of the Web. I am also the editor of the globally diverse anthology Climate Collapse? Calls to Action from Around the World, published by Arkbound in the UK.