"'For My Part, He/She Can Die...'"

How to pick up the threads of our talks, our wanderings together in this place where we meet with all the soundings of the human heart in our heads. I have traveled all these weeks with the names and faces of the Pussy Riot women in my line of sight; Maria Alyokhina, Yekaterina Samutsevich and Nadezhda Tolokonnika, their faces peering out between the bars of their cage. Their beauty, their youth bearing all the rage of Russian orthodoxy, their antic refusal of Putin's brutal masculinities, echoing women's rebellions from other times but now elemental hatreds and willed ignorances are riding high: "for my part, he can die, he's an Arab"/"If it's a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut the whole thing down." Violent nations, nations of occupation and of assumed exceptionalisms, find their reflections in the harrowing choices of the young, in the narrow heartedness of the old.

So many lovely things are in terrible danger.


I have tried to download some photos of our travels but my server will not allow it. I will try to get help to fix this. Thank you all for being there. Joan