“Monsters exist, but they are too few in numbers to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are… the functionaries ready to believe and act without asking questions.”

— by Primo Levi (1919-1987)

Suddenly, she is swept up, taken off, by remorseless shadows. She is taken in by specters, haunts and villains. She is detailed and detained. Enmeshed. Embedded. Dethroned. Defrocked. She is questioned. Why? Why do you exist? And do you believe you exist? And do you believe?

You are the tip of the enemy’s spear. You are poison cloaked in truth. You are the mischief we seek to empty from this world. You are, like any other earthen vessel, breakable, and we intend to break you.

(continue reading…)

If I am moved to give my mind and my energies to revealing the hidden details behind a story about a storyteller, beset by the political winds and deprived of her basic human intimacies, a reporter, a poet, a seer of deep patterns, it must be because we all have a fundamental human dignity that we wish would reach across the void to others, and if we are honest, we see when it is threatened.

I want to know what the shape and texture of the human voice, as a whole, really is, to know where beauties have been silenced, where serious thought is being diverted into pools of circular self-proclamation made by dictators and miscreants. I want to know how limited is my humanity by the limiting of someone else’s.

(continue reading…)