Jonathan VanAntwerpen's Blog, page 3

Tarrying with grief

Judith Butler | Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence | Photo: Jonathan VanAntwerpen

“Is there something to be gained from grieving, from tarrying with grief, from remaining exposed to its unbearability and not endeavoring to seek a resolution for grief through violence? Is there something to be gained in the political domain by maintaining grief as part of the framework within which we think our international ties? If we stay with the sense of loss, are we left feeling only passiv...

Forgiveness and the unforgivable

Jacques Derrida’s On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness | Photo: Jonathan VanAntwerpen

“In order to approach now the very concept of forgiveness, logic and common sense agree for once with the paradox: it is necessary, it seems to me, to begin from the fact that, yes, there is the unforgivable. Is this not, in truth, the only thing to forgive? The only thing that calls for forgiveness? If one is only prepared to forgive what appears forgivable, what the church calls ‘venial sin’, then the very idea ...

Jonathan VanAntwerpen | Going out

Country of My Skull: Guilt, Sorrow, and the Limits of Forgiveness in the New South Africa | Antjie Krog | Photo: Jonathan VanAntwerpen

The glimmer of an idea, not even half-formed, that I might research and write about truth and reconciliation first began to take shape while reading a borrowed book on a sunny beach in Santa Barbara, California. The book was Country of My Skull: Guilt, Sorrow, and the Limits of Forgiveness in the New South Africa, a “searing and luminous” piece of writing by Antji...

Something to Do

Zadie Smith, Intimations | Photo: Jonathan VanAntwerpen

“If you make things, if you are an ‘artist’ of whatever stripe, at some point you will be asked — or may ask yourself — ‘why’ you act, sculpt, paint, whatever. In the writing world, this question never seems to get old. In each generation, a few too many people will feel moved to pen an essay called, inevitably, ‘Why I Write’ or ‘Why Write?’ under which title you’ll find a lot of convoluted, more or less self-regarding reasons and explanatio...

The culture of healing

Louise Glück | American Originality: Essays on Poetry | Photo: Jonathan VanAntwerpen

“But if suffering is so hard, why should its expression be easy? Trauma and loss are not, in themselves, art: they are like half a metaphor. In fact, the kind of work I mean — however true its personal source — is tainted by a kind of preemptive avidity. It seems too ready to inhabit the most dramatic extremes; too ready to deny loss as continuity, as immutable fact. It proposes instead a narrative of personal tr...

Borrowed words

Zhang Huan, Three Legged Buddha | Storm King Art Center, December 5, 2020 | Photo: Jonathan VanAntwerpen | Copyright © 2021 Jonathan VanAntwerpen

From “What will survive of us is love,” published recently at Thrive Global:

We enjoin each other to remember with frequently fraught if well-intentioned formulas, and too commonly imagine the results as inevitably healing. When things turn out otherwise, as they often do, there are those who quickly tell us that we’re just not doing it right — that we n...

Every precious day

Sooki Raphael, Sparky Walks the Neighborhood with Ann, Nashville 2020

“The price of living with a writer was that eventually she would write about you. I was taking in every precious day. What Sooki gave me was a sense of order, a sense of God, the God of Sister Nena, the God of my childhood, a belief that I had gone into my study one night and picked up the right book from the hundred books that were there because I was meant to. I had a purpose to serve. The CA 19–9 had gone from 2,100 to 470. ...

The Neighborhood Has Its Own Rules

“One day while working in a DONE satellite office, located in one of the roughest and poorest parts of South LA, I decided to pay a visit to the Catholic church conveniently located right across the street. I met with the priest of this church and explained my research to him, which at the time was about black and Latino relations. He looked at me and said, ‘That sounds fantastic! This is the kind of thing that, as a pastor, I am trying to figure out. The church used to be predominantly African ...

Farewell, Promised Land: Waking from the California Dream

Farewell, Promised Land: Waking From the California Dream | Robert Dawson and Gray Brechin | University of California Press 1999 | Photo by Jonathan VanAntwerpen

“California has long served as the nation’s rift zone between fantasy and reality. Along that tense fissure, creativity and commitment have welled up, together with the more newsworthy forces of violence and destruction. Those who have come to this remarkable strip of land along the Pacific are learning that they can no longer rely on th...

How How to Do Nothing

How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell | Photo: Jonathan VanAntwerpen

“One thing I have learned about attention is that certain forms of it are contagious. When you spend enough time with someone who pays close attention to something (if you were hanging out with me, it would be birds), you inevitably start to pay attention to some of the same things. I’ve also learned that patterns of attention — what we choose to notice and what we do not — are how we render reality f...