Small worlds: my zines

Austin Kleon uncovered the world of zines for me a couple of weeks ago—and the timing couldn't be better.

Self-isolation further fostered my need to make things with my own two hands.

I'm lucky to have the flexibility to work from home, and stay safely secluded with my family, but isolation and screens wear on you.

Zines give me an opportunity to extend my imagination beyond the four walls. While my hands are busy cutting, gluing, and arranging bits of magazine scraps, my mind wanders far away from the coronavirus and the change it forced onto all of us.

For my first zine, I took a very lackluster approach. I didn't plan its flow or content. I opened an old edition of the Economist and picked visuals that struck me, and stuck with me. I first built the last page, then the first, and then had to find the way to connect them through the middle.

What came out of the process, was a gloomy story of a man who is different, and disliked for it.

Zine-ing like there's no tomorrow. It's a great way to upcycle some old editions of @TheEconomist. Thanks @austinkleon for the inspiration! #stayhomemakezines pic.twitter.com/d4fRm2mX7v

— Gavrilova (@marijagavrilovv) March 22, 2020

There was more of an intention behind my second zine. I had a cut-out of a fish, or a screaming girl, and some building roofs. I put those together. Then I went looking for a poem to inspire the rest. I went for Yoko Ono's book Grapefruit, because she'd surely have something strange enough to follow the story of a girl flying on a fish. And she does indeed.

A floating city 

The second level world 

Upstairs on the clouds 

Mountains and rain roaring underneath 

Like venice, we have to commute by 

boats through air currents to visit 

eachothers floating houses. 

Cloud gardens to watch all day

A floating city
The second level world
Upstairs on the clouds
Mountains and rain roaring underneath
Like venice, we have to commute by
boats through air currents to visit
eachothers floating houses.
Cloud gardens to watch all day @yokoono #stayhomemakezines pic.twitter.com/tcI6nQGX0b

— Gavrilova (@marijagavrilovv) March 28, 2020

The swans

I captured a photo of this swan couple during a walk today. They are calmness, they are grace, they are commitment. Black and white, this sight makes me think of my dear old neighbor who lost her husband of sixty years this week, and of her pain.

The words of W. B. Yeats fill the gray skies above the swans:

Unwearied still, lover by lover,
They paddle in the cold
Companionable streams or climb the air;
Their hearts have not grown old;
Passion or conquest, wander where they will,
Attend upon them still.

But now they drift on the still water,
Mysterious, beautiful;
Among what rushes will they build,
By what lake's edge or pool
Delight men's eyes when I awake some day
To find they have flown away?

My favorite photograph of Susan Sontag

I love this photograph of Susan Sontag with her son, David.

Their relaxed demeanor, her loving gaze, they know each other well as friends and family.

Sigrid Nunez, a woman whom David dated and who lived with them for two years wrote about Susan and David's relationship:

[S]he always insisted that she and David were different from ordinary mothers and sons. She liked to think of herself as David’s “goofy older sister.” It wasn’t neediness that made her want to keep David with her, she’d tell people, but her enormous love for him.

Susan Sontag loved lists. This one about raising a child, she put out in 1959, when David was seven years old. 

1. Be consistent.
2. Don't speak about him to others (e.g., tell funny things) in his presence. (Don't make him self-conscious.)
3. Don't praise him for something I wouldn't always accept as good.
4. Don't reprimand him harshly for something he's been allowed to do.
5. Daily routine: eating, homework, bath, teeth, room, story, bed.
6. Don't allow him to monopolize me when I am with other people.
7. Always speak well of his pop. (No faces, sighs, impatience, etc.)
8. Do not discourage childish fantasies.
9. Make him aware that there is a grown-up world that's none of his business.
10. Don't assume that what I don't like to do (bath, hairwash) he won't like either.

When humans suffer, nature rejoices

Living in the Anthropocene as is means that the growth of human well-being is burdened with high cost to the natural environment.

In the same manner, human suffering gives nature an opportunity for recovery.

The coronavirus outbreak reminds us of this balancing act.

Residents of Beijing report hearing the birds better:

Reduced human activity due to the #coronavirus means we can hear the birds better! One of the most active in my compound right now is the Light-vented Bulbul (白头鹎, Bái tóu bēi). A vernacular name is 白头公, bái-tóu gōng, literally translated as 'white-headed old-man'. pic.twitter.com/BWMeAqHmMW

— Birding Beijing 北京观鸟 (@BirdingBeijing) February 12, 2020

With a substantial decrease in the volume of international and national flights in China in the past month, as well as lower electricity demands, country's CO2 emissions have fallen by a quarter. Experts, however, caution that this is likely to be only a drop in annual emissions, and that the impact would come only with the long-term fall in demand.

How AI "understands" history

I use Unsplash on a weekly basis. It's one of the most popular stock photography repositories, and I appreciate the large selection, as well as vibrant and modern style of the photographs I find there.

Unsplash uses AI to tag and describe images. I encountered a number of interesting AI-sourced interpretations of well-known historical photographs. They made me chuckle.

In reality: Richard Nixon visiting quarantined Apolo 11 astronauts.

In reality: Graffiti painting on the Berlin wall titled "My God, Help Me Survive This Deadly Love", portrays the socialist fraternal kiss between Leonid Brezhnev and Erich Honecker.

In reality: Dwight D. Eisenhower, displaying Atoms for Peace post stamps, around 1955.

In reality: Ronald Reagan, then Governor of California, visits Los Alamos in 1967.  

Real love

The nature can teach us the virtues of real love, which begins with humility and patience.

It certainly has taught me. Wandering through the woods, experiencing vast spaces, free of human interference and mess. The most magnificent, or the most cruel (!), of its displays instils a sense of modesty: makes me feel insignificant in the abyss of the history of life and all its forms. 

Just look at us—merely a star

"Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives...on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam."#OTD 30 yrs ago @NASAVoyager took this picture pic.twitter.com/ylLzig2txS

— Stephanie Hamilton, PhD 🌌☄️🔭 is at #AAASmtg (@SpaceSciSteph) February 14, 2020

My favourite verse in the Bible, Corinthians 13:4, talks about love; it was always one of the rare parts of the Bible that made sense to me. It takes me to a place so far from busy streets, ugly politics, and nonsensical conflicts. It takes me to a pathless forest, the loudest creek, the chirpiest bird nests, and a roaring lion field. Replace love with nature and you get the essence of being. 

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no account of wrongs. Love takes no pleasure in evil, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be restrained; where there is knowledge, it will be dismissed. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when the perfect comes, the partial passes away.

Imagination will save us

Listening to one of my favorite podcasts, On Being, by the brilliant Krista Tippett; she is in conversation with poets Pádraig Ó Tuama and Marilyn Nelson. They go into how storytelling and the power of story gets trivialized, especially with the booming podcast industry. Krista read a piece of Ó Tuama's writing which resonated deeply within me; I feel it as a call to all of us, especially those who write, to serve the recovery of our world. We need imagination to see and accept being together where we are now.

These are the kinds of things we need for the tired spaces of our world. This is the way we need to move forward in a world that is so interested in being comforted by the damp blanket of bad stories. We need stories of belonging that move us towards each other, not from each other; ways of being human that open up the possibilities of being alive together; ways of navigating our differences that deepen our curiosity, that deepen our friendship, that deepen our capacity to disagree, that deepen the argument of being alive. This is what we need, this is what will save us, this is the work of peace. This is the work of imagination. 

The episode is available here https://onbeing.org/programs/padraig-o-tuama-and-marilyn-nelson-a-new-imagination-of-prayer/