You point to something here that few understand or are willing to engage with: that most political discourse has little to do with the issues at hand, with solutions or any moral imperative of governance. To put it more accurately, to the extent that it involves or is motivated by these things, they are not the primary motivation. Resolution is not about truth or justice; it's about catharsis. It's the desire we have to offload the dissonance we feel when confronted with some intractable political problem. The homeless person needs to disappear, not find a home; the bombed school is more tolerable when it's halfway across the world, happening to people who don't look like you; the victim needs blaming because it's much more cathartic to believe that the world is just, and that bad things only happen to those who fail along some moral dimension.
To simply endure; to hold the dissonance without relenting one way or the other; to insist on nuance and to avoid picking sides, when neither side is telling the truth or deserves your loyalty; these things are an absolute anathema to the modern western world, post smartphone and social media symbiosis. For all the reasons you mention, to hold an unresolved position; to fail to take sides; to deny yourself the catharsis of resolution, is the LEAST marketable thing I can imagine, because it's the hardest sell there is. Imagine selling a product or service without the promise of identity, validation, piece of mind, fairness, justice, happiness, personal transformation, acceptance, and the empty mantra that "you're enough".
That performance didn't change you, because your writing, in its own way, has reflected the very same ethic. This is the reason why I always applaud you for not tying your pieces up in neat little bows of resolution. The truly subversive, avant garde thing to do in this day and age is precisely what you have been doing: producing writing that believes itself, in recognition that the work will never be done.
What you’re describing underneath the catharsis point is something more precise than discomfort with injustice. The intolerance of suspended judgement, which is different. The homeless person, the bombed school, the victim who must somehow have warranted it are all instances of the mind rushing to close a file that the moral reality requires keeping open. And the rush is structural. We have built an entire information environment that rewards the closed file, the settled verdict, the position held with maximum confidence and minimum revision.
Nuance is unmarketable in that environment and algorithmically penalised. It generates no share, no outrage, no camp to join.
The point about neither side deserving loyalty is where I’d push slightly further. There is a difference between refusing sides because the truth is genuinely distributed across them, and refusing sides as a performance of sophistication. The first is intellectually costly. The second is its own form of catharsis, the superiority of the one who sees through everyone. What “satyagraha” demands, and what Glass enacts, is something harder than either… to hold a specific moral commitment without converting it into an identity, without needing the validation of a tribe, without the promise that it will resolve in your lifetime. That is the sell that has no market. And yet…
That last paragraph I’ll receive silently, Andrew, and mean it when I say: this exchange sharpened something in me that the essay left blunt. Thank you so much!
"to hold a specific moral commitment without converting it into an identity, without needing the validation of a tribe, without the promise that it will resolve in your lifetime. That is the sell that has no market. And yet…"
"To simply endure; to hold the dissonance without relenting one way or the other; to insist on nuance and to avoid picking sides, when neither side is telling the truth or deserves your loyalty; these things are an absolute anathema to the modern western world, post smartphone and social media symbiosis. For all the reasons you mention, to hold an unresolved position; to fail to take sides; to deny yourself the catharsis of resolution, is the LEAST marketable thing I can imagine, because it's the hardest sell there is."😮💨
Your essay identifies something that political analysis often misses. Endurance is a temporal structure. What Satyagraha accomplishes formally is the reconfiguration of time itself. Repetition, in Glass’s score, suspends the narrative demand that something must happen. And that is precisely where the political force enters. Systems of injustice depend on a choreography of acceleration, like crisis, reaction, outrage, replacement, each event rapidly displacing the last. By refusing narrative velocity, the opera withdraws from that choreography. It does not compete with the tempo of power, it alters the tempo of perception.
There is a striking parallel here with certain developments in modern visual art. Consider how Minimalist painters or sculptors replaced the drama of representation with duration and attention. A painting by Agnes Martin or a sculpture by Donald Judd does not announce meaning. Only holds a condition. At first encounter the viewer thinks nothing is happening, but slowly the perceptual field reorganizes itself around patience. The artwork becomes less an object than a training apparatus for attention. What Glass seems to understand, perhaps more intuitively than many political theorists in my opinion, is that this training of attention is itself a political capacity. Collective endurance cannot exist without a shared ability to remain inside unresolved time.
Your observation about the dancers is therefore crucial. In art history one often distinguishes between gesture and structure. Gesture is expressive, immediate, legible. Structure is what sustains pressure over time. Much contemporary political expression favors gesture: the speech, the slogan, the viral image. But satyagraha belongs to the category of structure. It resembles less the rhetoric of protest and more the architecture of a cathedral, an arrangement of forces designed to persist long after the initial intention has faded. The dancer’s held position, as you describe it, becomes analogous to a load-bearing column, not dramatic, but indispensable.
Your essay so beautifully demonstrates that certain artworks model the conditions under which those ideas become possible. Glass’s opera is not about resistance in the illustrative sense. It is an acoustic environment in which the audience rehearses the psychology of sustained conviction. The audience learns, bodily, what it means to inhabit unresolved moral time.
That insight makes your piece particularly compelling. You treat art as a laboratory where new political capacities are practiced. It is a rare and elegant synthesis of aesthetic perception and political critique, a truly sophisticated melange. Few essays manage to move so fluidly between music, philosophy, and contemporary unrest while maintaining intellectual clarity. Yours does so with remarkable composure.
And you are a piece of art, Tamara, the photos illustrating this essay are the proof.
I would like to press further on the distinction between gesture and structure, and you’ve given me a more precise instrument for thinking about why most political art fails on its own terms. It mistakes legibility for force. The slogan is readable but not essential; it collapses under sustained pressure because it was designed for impact rather than duration.
What Glass understood, and what the Minimalists understood in a different register, is that attention is a capacity that atrophies without exercise. Agnes Martin is a good example… those grids are not decorations of patience, they are its actual mechanism. You stand in front of one long enough and something reorganises in you that no amount of protest imagery could touch.
The parallel with “satyagraha” is almost too exact to be coincidental. Gandhi’s method was structurally Minimalist before Minimalism had a name… the removal of all dramatic gesture in favour of sustained, unremarkable presence. No crescendo. No catharsis. Just the held position, day after day, which the colonial administration found more disorienting than any confrontation would have been because it offered nothing to react against.
The training of attention you describe is not only political but pre-political. It precedes the formation of collective will. You cannot coordinate sustained nonviolent résistance among people who cannot tolerate unresolved time individually, which is why the opera feels, to me, less like a representation of “satyagraha” and more like a mild dose of it, enough to remind the body what the full thing would cost.
I’ll receive gracefully the last line, and I am grateful, Alexander.
I admire the rigor of your thinking, and the way you allow experience to remain unresolved without diminishing it.
Attention itself as an ethical act. Not just endurance, not just holding the line but the refusal to let your attention be trivialized. In a world that constantly fragments us, to remain attentive to what hurts, to what is unjust, without converting it into quick meaning or consumable outrage… that feels like a deeper form of satyagraha. Almost like a precondition for it. Before the body holds, before the voice resists, attention decides what is worthy of being held at all.
Your writing does this. It doesn’t rush to resolve, it doesn’t decorate suffering into something legible, it attends to it, with a kind of intellectual and emotional integrity that feels increasingly endangered.
And the photos, there’s something profoundly coherent in them with what you’ve written. They witness. They carry that same suspension, that same refusal to collapse into spectacle. You can feel the duration inside them, the stillness that isn’t empty but charged. Its presence, extended.
Also, there’s something deeply moving in the fact that you were invited into this by one of the artists. Not just as a spectator, but as someone trusted to receive and translate, without translating, paradoxically. That kind of invitation is intimate. It says something about how your way of seeing is already in conversation with the work itself.
What you’ve written performs the same resistance to immediacy, and reading it, I had the rare feeling of being asked not to understand, but to stay. And I could have stayed for 20,000 words not only 2,000. Thank you, Tamara, for everything you write.
P.S. And I miss so much seeing the opera or ballet shows at Garnier.
The precondition point is also amazing because you’ve identified something the political tradition of nonviolent résistance rarely makes explicit. Before Gandhi could ask anyone to hold a position under pressure, something prior had to happen… the decision, made individually and then collectively, about what was worth holding. And that decision is attentional before it is moral. You cannot sustain what you have not first genuinely seen, not glanced at, not processed, not filed under the appropriate emotional category, but seen, with the full cost that implies.
Which is why the fragmentation is so precisely targeted, whether by design or by the logic of the system that profits from it. Fragment attention finely enough and the prior decision never gets made. Nothing accumulates sufficient weight to be worth holding.
The outrage is real but weightless, which is a combination that exhausts without producing anything durable.
The observation about Olivia’s invitation touches something I didn’t quite write into the essay… that being trusted to receive without immediately translating is its own form of relationship, and a rare one. Most of what passes for critical attention is really just rapid domestication with better vocabulary. To be invited as a witness rather than a reviewer changes what you’re able to bring back.
Come back to the Garnier when you can. Some rooms insist on being inhabited in person.
You write about art by metabolzsing it. Your essay behaves like Satyagraha… slow, recursive, disobedient to the demand for takeaway meaning. That’s a kind of artistic integrity most people only gesture toward.
Perhaps the real scandal of works like this is that they expose how addicted we’ve become to translation as control. We don’t just want to understand, we want to domesticate. Turn experience into captions, suffering into frameworks, resistance into “content” as you described in so many essays. The insistence on immediate intelligibility is managerial. If I can summarise it, I can file it. If I can file it, I can stop being changed by it.
And Satyagraha refuses filing. It lingers like an unresolved chord in the nervous system, which is precisely why it feels so politically subversive. It denies us the illusion that understanding is the same as participation.
You live inside it on the page. What a fabulous experience. And the Palais Garnier is for me the most beautiful opera house in the world.
“Domesticate” is the exact word!! and it exposes something the more polite vocabulary of “interpretation” conceals. Interpretation still implies a kind of respect for the original; domestication is about rendering it safe, bringing it inside, making it sit. What the demand for immediate intelligibility really wants is submission. The work should not cost anything beyond the time allocated to consume it. “Satyagraha” refuses that transaction at the level of its formal DNA, which is why it produces in certain listeners not understanding but something more unsettling…. the sensation of having been inhabited by something that didn’t ask permission.
The unresolved chord in the nervous system is precisely it. And what stays unresolved is not the meaning but the demand the work makes, which doesn’t dissolve when you walk out into the night air. You carry it home like a low-grade fever that isn’t quite unpleasant enough to treat.
As for the Palais Garnier… there is something almost perverse about that particular friction, all that gilded self-certainty receiving a work designed to undo certainty. I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Only if the water is cold enough to make stopping genuinely tempting. The distinction I’d draw is between endurance that has somewhere to go and endurance that has decided, consciously, at some cost, that it will not be moved by the pressure to arrive. Treading water can be either, depending on whether you’re waiting for a boat or refusing one.
It is significant that Glass chose the period roughly overlaying Le Belle Epoque, that age of gilded resistance against rage, when a collective suspension of villainy was brokered. It was during this long, deep civilizational breath that Gandhi's concept of Satyagraha could grasp the air needed to inflate into something tangible. It seems as though it took a frame, the humiliating fall of the Second Empire on the one end, and the terrible Guns of August when, with one final, harsh attempt to banish threat and fear with force, on the other end, for the concept of Satyagraha to find the right register.
Prior to that, the western tradition might turn to the theological precedent of Job, that faithful son who in the face of absurd villainy refused the two resolutions Gandhi's third option overcomes, reciprocal villainy or victimized fatalism. Instead, with steadfast strength and active faith, he carved out his own response, something like Satyagraha. Job and his lineage understood that retaliation scales into trench warfare and that razing the ‘temples’ of tradition results in a collective shell shock and a modern nihilism. Satyagraha holds something much more elusive, but also something much more unyielding: a ferocious faith in the humanity of the human spirit.
Job, Jesus, Tolstoy, Gandhi, and Glass, and now this author, reject both standard modalities. If those two tendencies lead to destruction, what is this Satyagraha that holds the rage against injustice and builds something lasting? How does it process suffering without catharsis (the trenches)? How does it metabolize oppression without cynicism (modernity)? Firstly, it does not deny the conditions; the villainy is real, the rage is natural. Secondly, it does not suppress them; by 1914 Le Belle Epoque had revealed itself to be a temporary and false hope at best.
Satyagraha simply holds the oppression, standing firm, like a beach against a persistent tide, like a precipice against relentless gravity, like a beating heart against time.
It does not abuse nor merely endure. It reflects, both as a mirror to the oppressor with the active stillness of a psychological judo, and as a lens turned toward its own inner responsibility. In these ways, Satyagraha gives the rage dissipative energy without forcing it to be other than it is. It contains the tensions entropically. It centers rather than opposes.
An opera that swirls into unresolved progressions leaves the audience to dissipate meaning into being. Sound, movement, irresolute compositions dissolve constellations of certainty into fields of faith, not in something external, but of something living. Where oppression deconstructs, operatic Satyagraha builds solidarity with one’s quantum-like wholeness and finds sacred ground. Satyagraha, once understood, can be employed daily against the universal injustice common to all, one’s own mortality.
Bravo, Andrew! The Job parallel is one I should have seen and didn’t, which is the mark of a true generative observation. What Job refuses is precisely the two exits that his comforters keep offering: either you must have sinned to deserve this, or the universe is simply indifferent and your suffering meaningless. Both are forms of premature closure, one theological, one nihilistic, and Job rejects them both with a stubbornness that reads, in your framing, as “proto-satyagraha”. He will not be consoled into a manageable story. He insists on the full weight of the contradiction — “I am faithful, I am suffering, these facts coexist” — and holds it until something larger than either term responds. That is a form of demand made without violence.
And you strike again because the Belle Époque framing opens something I hadn’t considered. Satyagraha required a particular historical pressure gradient to become legible. Not the open barbarism of earlier centuries, where force answered force without embarrassment, but that peculiar civilisational suspension, gilded, optimistic, secretly essential collapse, in which a third option could briefly find oxygen. Gandhi needed the British Empire at a specific moment of its own self-contradiction, needing to believe itself civilised while behaving otherwise. Satyagraha inserted itself precisely into that gap between claim and conduct.
Your final turn, satyagraha as a daily practice against one’s own mortality, is where the argument achieves something beyond political philosophy. If the deepest injustice is the one no collective action can overturn, then the discipline of holding without resolving becomes a way of being in time. The beach does not defeat the tide. It simply remains a beach.
Thank you so much for your absolutely wonderful comment, Andrew!
The realm I'm writing in (motherhood, addiction, trauma) is very different but oh my gosh, this eloquent essay gave me that illusive feeling of truly being *seen*. One of my primary goals in my writing is the rejection of catharsis. (Tiny plug here, I'm working on a series of essays called "Say the Scary Thing Out Loud" which will be thoroughly steeped in this kind of anti-resolution but in the world of motherhood.) The challenges, struggles and realities of everyday life rarely end up resolved and put to rest. They seldom end, period. Just like the larger political, social and cultural arena. I absolutely despise the stories that we're told with tidy resolutions because people use them as a measuring stick and, of course, real life will never be able to compete.
Another commenter said it and it's absolutely true, there's nothing less marketable than refusing to take a side and respecting nuance. It's always been that way but started escalating around 2015 and has just gotten worse and worse. I don't understand how the people I know who are steeped in this toxic political "discourse" don't just scream and never stop.
Its a sad state of affairs in the US on so many levels. But whatever keeps the clicks, eyeballs and dollars coming in, I guess?
I had so much more to say but I am rambling here and I feel ridiculous. So, I'll just finish by saying thank you for sharing this experience of yours. It clearly struck a chord with me!
Don’t edit the ramble, Cappy, the best thinking often arrives in that register, before the self-censoring sets in!
The territory you’re working in is not different from mine in the way you might think. Motherhood, addiction, trauma are precisely the domains where the pressure to resolve is most violent, because the people around you need the story to end so they can stop being implicated by your continuing to live inside it. The tidy resolution protects the reader, not the writer. Rejecting it is an act of fidelity to the actual texture of experience, which rarely closes and never quite explains itself.
“Say the Scary Thing Out Loud” already tells me something about the stakes of what you’re building, that the refusal of catharsis there isn’t aesthetic preference but ethical commitment. The scary thing stays scary when you say it. That’s the point. That’s what most writing about difficult subjects defuses on the way to the page.
The 2015 escalation you name is real and I think underexamined. Something tipped…. not just politically but in the grammar of public feeling. The space for “I don’t know” or “both things are true and neither fully” effectively closed, and what replaced it was the demand for allegiance dressed as clarity.
I don’t think you’re rambling, honestly! I think you arrived at the precise thing and then got nervous about having said it. Don’t be!
You're very kind Tamara and I so appreciate the reassurances. I spent most of my life being talked over and through, when I wasn't just ignored completely. I've spent the last four years trying to undo the messages I internalized from being treated that way but sometimes I can't help myself. Kind of like a reflexive apology.
Sorry. (Lol.)
I had some words about 2015 but they've been lost ro the ether. I do remember I wanted to say thank you again for a great essay and a nice little exchange here in the comments. If only the rest of the internet could manage this, how nice it could be!
Dear Tamara …I don’t consider myself an intellectual … maybe a “sentimental” if that can mean anything… (you may have seen that in what and how I write) … and so your exposé of the Satyagraha really speaks to me with a very quiet but, oh so strong, voice.
The Camusian hero … alone ! … while Satyagraha requires company ! a collective effort … and “receiving through the body” … stillness … stay … hold on … hold fast … “hold the line” … (a phrase I used to encourage my production teams !) and more : do not retaliate ! a good answer to ambient Chaos! Standing in the middle of the square, facing the monster … but not enough … you say … “The sustained, unremarkable, unperformable holding of a position over time”.
I will not comment over your words, Tamara … but I am taking this as a message in view of what I am writing …so relevant …
The force … the myth … presence ! paying attention !
Some words that stood out in my world:
“The moral demand of nonviolence was unconditional, not strategic.
Not: resist because it will work. But: resist because to not resist is to have already lost something more fundamental than the immediate fight.
What we struggle to represent, and therefore to value, are the years of unglamorous collective endurance before the speech, the thousands of unnamed people who held the position without knowing whether it would be held long enough to matter. Satyagraha is an opera about those people,
The refusal to be moved, in both senses, from your position, and into someone else’s emotional economy of panic and reaction.
the sensation that it is possible to hold a position for a very long time without resolving it, and that this is not a failure to act but is itself a form of action.
I thought: this is what a civilisation that still believes in itself sounds like. I am not sure we sound like this anymore.
From a city that has always confused beauty with immunity, on the night after an opera that reminded me, without argument and without mercy, that the most political act available to us may simply be the refusal to let go of what we know to be true.”
Thank you so much for this gift. I will see it Friday the 24th. Letting it dig deep in my stomach and my soul …
The sentimental and the intellectual are not the opposites the academy pretends they are. Sentiment, properly understood, is what keeps thought from becoming merely clever, it is the insistence that ideas have weight, that they land somewhere in a body and leave a mark. What you describe in how you read, and apparently in how you write, sounds less like sentiment in the diminished sense and more like a refusal to let language remain abstract. That is not a lesser mode. It is, in some ways, the harder one. And I admire that.
I am happy that you will see it on the 24th.
The lines you lifted are the ones I’m glad survived the writing. Particularly the unnamed thousands, because history has a way of compressing collective endurance into individual biography, the great man at the centre of the stage, and what gets lost in that compression is the actual substance of what satyagraha is: not a quality of exceptional souls but a practice of ordinary people who decided, together, without guarantee, to hold.
Take it into your writing! That is the best use I can imagine for it.
being "merely clever" ! that's a good one ... it's exactly my feeling about French literary thought ... Ils ont de l'esprit ! Ah ! les beaux mots ... les belles tournures ... l'apparence, plutôt que simplement une vérité dites pour que tout puissent comprendre. Le vrai "esprit" (esprit comme âme) n'existe pas en France ... Quand on a de l'esprit ici, c'est qu'on sait jouer avec les mots !!!
Heureusement, il y a Camus, ou Hugo ... autrement ... pas beaucoup plus ! Traitre à ma patrie ! mais sans honte !
deciding to hold ... that's the thing ... may our future company of heroes hold the line ... et qu'ils puissent tous ensemble, créer le nouveau mythe ... nous verrons !
C'est vous que je remercie, Tamara ... j'ai beaucoup de chance que vous soyez là ...
je suis à 97 pages ... et maintenant, je dois tout revoir avec un nouveau regard ...
🦋💕
Je viens d'une famille de peintres ... la seule façon de vraiment "regarder" un tableau, est de le pendre assez bas ... pour que le coeur du tableau soit au niveau du ventre ... et là, il faut le prendre dans le corps ... in the body ... sans pensée sans mots ... just le tenir là ... to hold it ...
“The body knows things about endurance…” feels like a description of nonviolence in practice.
That line really echoes what Mahatma Gandhi was doing, not just politically, but on a deeply human level.
Gandhi’s approach wasn’t just an idea or a moral stance. It was something lived through the body. Holding ground without retaliating. Staying present under pressure. Regulating the impulse to react, even when provoked.
That’s what made Satyagraha so powerful. It wasn’t passive. It required discipline, restraint, and a kind of physical and emotional control that most people aren’t trained to access. The refusal to strike back wasn’t weakness. It was a deliberate act that exposed injustice without becoming it.
And that applies beyond politics too. On a personal level, it’s the same principle. The ability to pause instead of react. To hold tension without escalating it. Whether in a conflict, a relationship, or a wider system, that kind of grounded presence has the power to shift things in a way force often can’t.
At the end of the day, I think true power comes from controlling yourself in a way that external influences are incapable of changing a humans compassion and love for the world 💛
The word “trained” in your reading fascinates me because it implies that what Gandhi was doing was not natural, not the expression of an unusually serene temperament, but the result of practice, repetition, the kind of disciplined rehearsal that produces capacity where none existed before. Which matters enormously. If nonviolence were simply a virtue some people possess, it would be admirable but not transmissible. The fact that it requires training means it can be taught, learned, built collectively, not just individually.
The final point you make is where I’d want to add one complication, if you allow me, not to resist it but to sharpen it. Controlling oneself so that compassion remains intact under pressure, yes, absolutely! But satyagraha at its most demanding asks something beyond self-regulation. It asks that the compassion extend to the one applying the pressure. Not as sentiment, not as performance, but as a genuine recognition of the other’s humanity even while refusing their terms. That is where most of us, myself included, find the limit of what the body has been trained to hold.
It is also, I suspect, where the truly transformative power lives… not in the refusal to strike, but in the refusal to stop seeing.
This precisely it, Tamara: "what remains possible is presence. The refusal to be moved, in both senses, from your position, and into someone else’s emotional economy of panic and reaction.". Brilliant. Here is my perspective, from this end of the Atlantic, in terms of how superficially devoid of feeling, art has become: https://peaisgreen.substack.com/p/madama-butterfly-and-an-ode-to-the
The phrase “superficially devoid of feeling” already tells me that the problem isn’t absence of emotion in contemporary art so much as the simulation of it, feeling performed at the surface so efficiently that nothing is required to go deeper. Which is its own form of the emotional economy I was writing against. Presence, as I mean it, is incompatible with that, you cannot be genuinely present and simultaneously curating your own reaction for an audience.
I think I am on firm footing to make this claim: words and language are rather important to you Tamara. As they are to me, but what I read here is an entreaty to let go the formation of concepts and words, let them slip away as a note or a twirling limb drifts from event to afterglow. That act of rigidly defining our reality by pouring experience into the vessel of languages as means to describe complexity, challenges, difficulty-at-large, and the myriad positive experiences joy, ecstasy, love, kindness et al. disrupts something in our fundamental understanding of reality—particularly when analysis through language is predominantly our method of communing with the world.
I always think about a statement I heard: the Catholic liturgy lost the flock as soon as it was translated to the vernacular. It delighted me to think that the power of the faith was transmitted through the poetry, not the story details; the intention and the musicality of the liturgical composition could be transmitted to a congregation— not with detail, but with a certain feeling tone. Which, when combined with context of the sacred space, primed the faithful to feel the spirit rather than analyse it. And your opera experience, made mysterious by the lack of language comprehension (note to Museguided scholars, there’s a language she doesn’t know) and how Glass transmitted something deep without force feeding it through clear direction and neatly resolved arcs is a version of that effort to keep a story mysterious. It sounds like You were held in thrall to a full sensory experience, rather than the blunt instrument of being told what is happening. How quaint!!!
There is probably some value in keeping a story mysterious. A story moves you deeper when you eventually learn what the message is after some additional toil.
I am chronically inept at hearing lyrics in a song when I experience it the first time. Indeed, if I can parse the lyrics on the first listen, I often lose immersion, and I don’t think I hear the song properly… I have probably missed a lot of good music I’d consider pop or simple, because I get wrapped around a simple lyrical story and I fail to see the whole magic of a track. However, if a musician can artfully bury a message under esoteric, occult imagery, and other such hard to parse layers of nonsense, follow that with a musical pattern based on the Fibonacci sequence— well! I will adore your music forever. But I digress.
I believe I have mentioned this to you before, Tamara, that one of the most prominent through lines I experience when reading your work is the notion that you are encouraging the reader to bring their discernment back from the mind to the body… and hopefully not to keep it there, but to have the felt experience as part of a holistic practice of becoming. This essay is the full bloom of that idea tethered to the framework of what sounds and looks like an exquisite experience at Place de l’Opéra— full of soul-force and the reification of that request to take experience out of the mind and feel the vibrations in the body.
Using art and literature to make this point feels like the sweet spot of your writing. Your effortless ability (“perceived ease”, I’m sure there is some toil on the backend of these essays :)) to weave the deep importance of music and poetry as a vehicle to elicit, in your readers, a deeper resonant experience above and beyond merely comprehending a story, is a wonder. For me, I take away from this essay, the idea that one should ingest art at multiple levels, with the intention to skillfully hold space for the body to involve itself in the afterglow of an artistic experience. This is a truly necessary salve for a world that has us consuming at double time.
And that double-time consumption isn’t just the result of a social media landscape that makes eye-watering amounts of money on getting you to consume more. It is also part of education and business. Getting things done swiftly, without pause is thoroughly incentivized in both domains.
Part of my joy at discovering your writing, Tamara, and with your friendly prompts, is the encouragement to read poetry for the first time, in a way that actually works for me—not a mad dash to the end, to say I’ve completed another great work! And as clumsy as I am at it, the experience is… hard to put into words, which is precisely the point.
I’ve been reading William Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell. I am taking it ever so slow. The book was a colleague’s at work, and when I asked her how she found it, she told me she has repressed it. Because she read it during her post-secondary schooling and it was part of a gauntlet of reading that she had to do. She didn’t enjoy it. She finished it.
I am enjoying it, and I think it is of the same register as your enjoyment of Satyagraha. By letting the ideas, musicality, imagery, movement, and eventually the underlying message, unfurl without grasping at meaning, this changes the colour of the experience. The insight deepens. The ideas take root and start augmenting the mind… a tall order in the 21st century when the mind is ferociously trying to show it has mastery quickly… not a lot rearranges within under those conditions of demonstrating mastery versus achieving it.
And yes, reading poetry slowly and methodically doesn’t grant immediate value, but it is a truly wonderful counterpoint to consumption environment that has, up until recently, well and truly upended my capacity to experience art and story at the level that actually moves me.
Taking in art as you describe it, Tamara, is a practice. Not a piece of advice to performatively nod my head and call it a day… it is effortful. It requires what a certain Soprano transmitted to you: art requires conviction.
Holding true to discomfort and joy; sorrow and ecstasy, experiencing these in ways that don’t feel like you are just about ready for the next thing… This is truly a sustainability habit for consumption. A kind of hygiene for ingesting the world in a way that works a different set of muscles than the double-time consumption incentivized by social media, education, and business. I immensely appreciate your writing and your thinking and how it has enabled me to re-work my consumption habits. I no longer retreat after an experience and start scanning for the next hit (not always… sometimes though… I’m still conditioned to some extent!). This though, is an ongoing practice. I am still learning.
It is nice to sit in a moment, not to resolve it immediately and just see what else erupts in consciousness, if you can just… let go…
Ohhh Adam, the Catholic liturgy observation carries more weight than even you’ve given it. What was lost in translation wasn’t accessibility, the vernacular made the content more accessible, which is precisely the problem. The Latin held the congregation at the threshold of comprehension, in that productive zone where the mind cannot fully grasp and therefore the body must take over. Mystery is not obscurantism; it is the condition under which something deeper than understanding becomes possible. The moment the story became fully legible, it became merely a story, subject to agreement, disagreement, boredom, critique. The untranslatable resists all of those exits.
Blake is the marvellous companion to this. Straight to my heart (I think you know how obsessed I am with him). “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell” doesn’t yield to the first reading because it wasn’t designed to, not out of difficulty for its own sake, but because Blake understood that the rational faculty, what he called Urizen, will immediately colonise any meaning it can extract and file it under what it already knows. The imagery has to be strange enough, the logic has to be sufficiently diagonal, to slip past that colonising impulse and land somewhere less defended. Your colleague who repressed it read it under precisely the conditions designed to prevent it from working: the gauntlet, the deadline, the imperative to finish. She encountered the words. She never encountered the book.
What you’re describing in your own reading practice, the deliberate slowing, the refusal to grasp, is not a reading technique so much as an epistemological reorientation. You decide, in advance, that mastery is not the goal, which is an extraordinarily difficult decision in a cognitive environment that rewards demonstrated comprehension above almost everything else. The educational system you mention incentivises speed and the performance of having understood, which is a subtly different thing and considerably more damaging. You can perform understanding without having been changed at all. The performance, in fact, protects you from the change.
The Fibonacci sequence aside made me smile, not because it digresses but because it doesn’t! What draws you into music that buries its logic under layers of resistant imagery is the same thing that held you inside Blake, the same thing Glass engineers over three hours of Sanskrit and harmonic circles. And that is the refusal to make comprehension easy enough to substitute for experience. The song you can parse on first listen has already given you everything it has. The one that withholds something keeps generating, keeps working on you in the hours and days after, keeps recalibrating things you didn’t know you had in your mind.
The distinction between demonstrating mastery and achieving it is the malt fascinating for me because it maps so precisely onto what satyagraha asks politically. The activist who needs to be seen resisting is demonstrating. The one who holds the position whether or not anyone is watching is achieving something… slower, less legible, infinitely more durable. Both in art and in politics, the performance of the thing and the thing itself have become so confused that we’ve largely lost the ability to distinguish them. Which is why an opera in Sanskrit, a poem that resists first reading, a political résistance that refuses the spectacle of confrontation feel, in the current moment, almost scandalously countercultural.
The fact that you are still learning, still occasionally reaching for the next hit, still working against the conditioning, that honesty is itself a form of the practice. The ones who claim to have mastered slowness have almost certainly missed the point.
I feel seen and felt and understood in your comment, and for this I’m the most grateful, Adam! What a gift this is for me!
Thank you for your answer. When I first read this yesterday I was overwhelmed with both resonance and recognition. I wasn't able to comment because things got busy here, so had to come back to it today. And just now as I reread it several times I noticed that it was about a collective experience.
In the essay you wrote, "What satyagraha demands, and what Glass’s opera enacts, is the refusal of both terms: neither the numbing nor the reactive noise, but the third option that our current media environment has made almost unimaginable. The sustained, unremarkable, unperformable holding of a position over time." I found in those words, the description of a lived experience for which I had had no previous way to express it - two experiences actually. A lifelong battle for control of my life with my mother, and the more recent struggles to find my way as a priest, when my view of who I should be and how I should be is so different from what the lineage/organisation wants and expects of me.
"...resist because to not resist is to have already lost something more fundamental than the immediate fight." This moved me deeply in both lived experiences of my own. And in these past months I've rediscovered part of myself that was so well-buried that I had forgotten what it was that was gone. I only knew something was missing in me that was essential, and that first response of yours to my comment gave me the clue that led to its discovery months later.
In the essay you said, "Simone Weil wrote that affliction becomes real at the moment the sufferer recognises the world’s indifference to their suffering. What remains possible after that recognition is the question. What remains moral. Glass’s answer, which is not an argument but a sonic fact, is that what remains possible is presence." This matches closely, if not perfectly with Ken McLeod's phrase in "An Arrow to the Heart," his commentary to the Heart Sutra, "compassion as presence." Since I first read that in 2008, the words "compassion as presence" have been a kind of motto or mantra for me. There are so many times no words can help, but simply showing up for someone and being there, being present, no matter how awkward or uncomfortable, is everything.
"I left the theatre not cleansed, not uplifted, but altered in some more obscure way, like a piece of paper that has been lightly dampened and left to dry. Something in my shape was different. The sonic repetition had done something to my sense of time, and the low-grade urgency I carry constantly had been displaced, not soothed but replaced, temporarily, by something more durable… the sensation that it is possible to hold a position for a very long time without resolving it, and that this is not a failure to act but is itself a form of action."
There is so much in this quote of yours. I read the first line and nodded, because I, too, had been altered. In my case, altered by your essay, and in ways I'm only just beginning to explore. I imagine my understanding of how it has affected me will unfold over time.
The last line, that holding the position "is itself a form of action" is like a call to arms. To put everyone on notice that action isn't always like an action movie. An oak tree grows slowly, almost unnoticeably, until suddenly you realise you are cool in its shade on a hot summer day, and you see it is mature.
I thought all of this might come across as arrogant, or as if I thought I was a collective all by myself (I'm not that foolish!), so your answer to my previous question made it possible for me to share this response. Thanks, Tamara.
The oak tree is the only argument I need. Growth that is imperceptible until it isn’t, shade that arrives without announcement, the tree indifferent to whether anyone noticed its decades of silent work. That is a more honest image of how change actually moves than anything the action movie provides.
The battle with your mother, the tension between your vocation and the institution that houses it are not private analogies to satyagraha. They are the thing itself, lived at the scale where most of us actually encounter it… not in public squares but in the long, undramatic negotiations between who we know ourselves to be and what the surrounding structure insists we become. The organisation, like the empire, depends on your eventual compliance. The refusal to comply while refusing also to simply leave, to remain present inside the contradiction without being dissolved by it, is precisely the discipline Glass spent three hours asking his audience to inhabit.
Ken McLeod’s phrase has been with you since 2008 and that Weil’s formulation met it here, and that kind of convergence is a form of recognition. Two different traditions arriving at the same irreducible fact: when words fail, when argument exhausts itself, what remains possible is the body in the room, present, undefeated, not performing comfort but offering something more durable than comfort. Witness.
Thank you for coming back with this amazing comment, Doc!
This essay was profound for me Tamara and I needed to sit with it and read through it a couple of times. You reminded me of a story I hadn't thought about in a long time, and this thought specifically brought me back "... the sensation that it is possible to hold a position for a very long time without resolving it, and that this is not a failure to act but is itself a form of action." There are times we might question where is the justice for evil, cruel, vicious atrocities that have plagued our planet, and I've been exasperated with the slow pace of human consciousness. This story comes from the documentary "Watchers of the Sky." One of the films narrator's, Benjamin Ferencz, was a prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials for the people responsible for the atrocities committed by the Nazis. He found meaning for the "long arc of the moral universe" with the example of Danish astronomer, Tycho Brahe of the 16th century who was seeking the meaning of the universe. Brahe had convinced the king to build him a laboratory allowing him to chart and record the placement of the stars. Twenty-five years later a new king came to the throne and questioned what Brahe was doing. Brahe just said that he was "watching the skies." The king asked why, and Brahe said that he had charted 97 volumes charting the movement of every one of those stars trying to discover the meaning of the universe, admitting that he hadn't found it yet. However, he believed that someday his 25 years of labor would prove useful and save a person in the future 25 years of labor. Ferencz ends the story saying that when the American astronauts landed on the moon more than 500 years later, they had with them the tables of Tycho Brahe. The charts remained accurate. As you brilliantly note, "Not: resist because it will work. But: resist because to not resist is to have already lost something more fundamental than the immediate fight."
Tycho Brahe watching the skies for 25 years without the satisfaction of knowing what the data would eventually make possible is the image I didn’t have for what unconditional action looks like across geological time. Not faith in a specific outcome, but faith in the value of accurate witness itself. The charts were useful five centuries later precisely because Brahe didn’t wait to understand their purpose before making them. He simply made them, with rigour, in the dark, for a future he would never inhabit.
Ferencz understood, standing at Nuremberg with the full weight of what human beings had done to each other still warm in the record, that the arc Martin Luther King borrowed from Theodore Parker is not a metaphor of consolation but a description of a mechanism, one that requires people at every point along its length to do their portion of the work without seeing the whole curve. Brahe couldn’t see it. Ferencz could only see a fragment. The astronauts completed a trajectory none of them originated.
The exasperation with the slow pace of human consciousness is one I share without reservation. But Brahe’s 25 volumes suggest something uncomfortable…. that the pace may be non-negotiable, that consciousness moves at the speed it moves, and that the only available response is to make the most accurate charts you can and trust that someone, somewhere, five centuries hence, will need exactly what you recorded.
That is not a comfortable thought. It is, however, a sustaining one. Thank you for all this, Susan! You extended my thoughts in a wonderful way.
"the sensation that it is possible to hold a position for a very long time without resolving it, and that this is not a failure to act but is itself a form of action." Is this only a collective thing?
No, and the question cuts exactly where it should! There is a private satyagraha that rarely gets named as such… the refusal to resolve a grief prematurely, to force clarity on a relationship that isn’t finished declaring itself, to convert an open wound into a lesson before it has finished teaching. We do this constantly, not from strength but from the unbearable discomfort of remaining inside something that has no verdict yet. The pressure to conclude is as much internal as social.
What I’d say is that the collective form requires the individual capacity as its precondition… you cannot hold a position together with others if you haven’t first developed some tolerance for holding it alone, in the dark, without the warmth of consensus to sustain you. Gandhi’s public endurance was built on an extraordinarily demanding private practice. The years of unglamorous internal work preceded the years of unglamorous collective work.
Where the individual and collective forms diverge is in what sustains them. Alone, you are dependent entirely on whatever private faith or discipline you have cultivated. Together, there is a different kind of fuel, the knowledge that others are also holding, which doesn’t resolve the difficulty but makes it bearable in a way that solitude sometimes cannot. Each form makes the other more possible. Neither is sufficient alone.
You point to something here that few understand or are willing to engage with: that most political discourse has little to do with the issues at hand, with solutions or any moral imperative of governance. To put it more accurately, to the extent that it involves or is motivated by these things, they are not the primary motivation. Resolution is not about truth or justice; it's about catharsis. It's the desire we have to offload the dissonance we feel when confronted with some intractable political problem. The homeless person needs to disappear, not find a home; the bombed school is more tolerable when it's halfway across the world, happening to people who don't look like you; the victim needs blaming because it's much more cathartic to believe that the world is just, and that bad things only happen to those who fail along some moral dimension.
To simply endure; to hold the dissonance without relenting one way or the other; to insist on nuance and to avoid picking sides, when neither side is telling the truth or deserves your loyalty; these things are an absolute anathema to the modern western world, post smartphone and social media symbiosis. For all the reasons you mention, to hold an unresolved position; to fail to take sides; to deny yourself the catharsis of resolution, is the LEAST marketable thing I can imagine, because it's the hardest sell there is. Imagine selling a product or service without the promise of identity, validation, piece of mind, fairness, justice, happiness, personal transformation, acceptance, and the empty mantra that "you're enough".
That performance didn't change you, because your writing, in its own way, has reflected the very same ethic. This is the reason why I always applaud you for not tying your pieces up in neat little bows of resolution. The truly subversive, avant garde thing to do in this day and age is precisely what you have been doing: producing writing that believes itself, in recognition that the work will never be done.
Brilliant work, Tamara.
What you’re describing underneath the catharsis point is something more precise than discomfort with injustice. The intolerance of suspended judgement, which is different. The homeless person, the bombed school, the victim who must somehow have warranted it are all instances of the mind rushing to close a file that the moral reality requires keeping open. And the rush is structural. We have built an entire information environment that rewards the closed file, the settled verdict, the position held with maximum confidence and minimum revision.
Nuance is unmarketable in that environment and algorithmically penalised. It generates no share, no outrage, no camp to join.
The point about neither side deserving loyalty is where I’d push slightly further. There is a difference between refusing sides because the truth is genuinely distributed across them, and refusing sides as a performance of sophistication. The first is intellectually costly. The second is its own form of catharsis, the superiority of the one who sees through everyone. What “satyagraha” demands, and what Glass enacts, is something harder than either… to hold a specific moral commitment without converting it into an identity, without needing the validation of a tribe, without the promise that it will resolve in your lifetime. That is the sell that has no market. And yet…
That last paragraph I’ll receive silently, Andrew, and mean it when I say: this exchange sharpened something in me that the essay left blunt. Thank you so much!
The Paris shows are sold out. But the company is livestreaming it on the 24th of this month, 1330 (Paris time I assume).
https://play.operadeparis.fr/p/satyagraha-live
-A public service announcement from a ‘man of action’ (not necessarily good action) who is willing to sit still for this
Thank you for this, Robin! My readers can watch it. But If it’s live-streaming, it’s probably not Paris time. The show starts at 19:30 Paris time.
"to hold a specific moral commitment without converting it into an identity, without needing the validation of a tribe, without the promise that it will resolve in your lifetime. That is the sell that has no market. And yet…"
🫨
"To simply endure; to hold the dissonance without relenting one way or the other; to insist on nuance and to avoid picking sides, when neither side is telling the truth or deserves your loyalty; these things are an absolute anathema to the modern western world, post smartphone and social media symbiosis. For all the reasons you mention, to hold an unresolved position; to fail to take sides; to deny yourself the catharsis of resolution, is the LEAST marketable thing I can imagine, because it's the hardest sell there is."😮💨
The Paris shows are sold out. But the company is livestreaming it on the 24th of this month, 1330 (Paris time I assume).
https://play.operadeparis.fr/p/satyagraha-live
-A public service announcement from a ‘man of action’ (not necessarily a good man) who is willing to sit still for this
Your essay identifies something that political analysis often misses. Endurance is a temporal structure. What Satyagraha accomplishes formally is the reconfiguration of time itself. Repetition, in Glass’s score, suspends the narrative demand that something must happen. And that is precisely where the political force enters. Systems of injustice depend on a choreography of acceleration, like crisis, reaction, outrage, replacement, each event rapidly displacing the last. By refusing narrative velocity, the opera withdraws from that choreography. It does not compete with the tempo of power, it alters the tempo of perception.
There is a striking parallel here with certain developments in modern visual art. Consider how Minimalist painters or sculptors replaced the drama of representation with duration and attention. A painting by Agnes Martin or a sculpture by Donald Judd does not announce meaning. Only holds a condition. At first encounter the viewer thinks nothing is happening, but slowly the perceptual field reorganizes itself around patience. The artwork becomes less an object than a training apparatus for attention. What Glass seems to understand, perhaps more intuitively than many political theorists in my opinion, is that this training of attention is itself a political capacity. Collective endurance cannot exist without a shared ability to remain inside unresolved time.
Your observation about the dancers is therefore crucial. In art history one often distinguishes between gesture and structure. Gesture is expressive, immediate, legible. Structure is what sustains pressure over time. Much contemporary political expression favors gesture: the speech, the slogan, the viral image. But satyagraha belongs to the category of structure. It resembles less the rhetoric of protest and more the architecture of a cathedral, an arrangement of forces designed to persist long after the initial intention has faded. The dancer’s held position, as you describe it, becomes analogous to a load-bearing column, not dramatic, but indispensable.
Your essay so beautifully demonstrates that certain artworks model the conditions under which those ideas become possible. Glass’s opera is not about resistance in the illustrative sense. It is an acoustic environment in which the audience rehearses the psychology of sustained conviction. The audience learns, bodily, what it means to inhabit unresolved moral time.
That insight makes your piece particularly compelling. You treat art as a laboratory where new political capacities are practiced. It is a rare and elegant synthesis of aesthetic perception and political critique, a truly sophisticated melange. Few essays manage to move so fluidly between music, philosophy, and contemporary unrest while maintaining intellectual clarity. Yours does so with remarkable composure.
And you are a piece of art, Tamara, the photos illustrating this essay are the proof.
I would like to press further on the distinction between gesture and structure, and you’ve given me a more precise instrument for thinking about why most political art fails on its own terms. It mistakes legibility for force. The slogan is readable but not essential; it collapses under sustained pressure because it was designed for impact rather than duration.
What Glass understood, and what the Minimalists understood in a different register, is that attention is a capacity that atrophies without exercise. Agnes Martin is a good example… those grids are not decorations of patience, they are its actual mechanism. You stand in front of one long enough and something reorganises in you that no amount of protest imagery could touch.
The parallel with “satyagraha” is almost too exact to be coincidental. Gandhi’s method was structurally Minimalist before Minimalism had a name… the removal of all dramatic gesture in favour of sustained, unremarkable presence. No crescendo. No catharsis. Just the held position, day after day, which the colonial administration found more disorienting than any confrontation would have been because it offered nothing to react against.
The training of attention you describe is not only political but pre-political. It precedes the formation of collective will. You cannot coordinate sustained nonviolent résistance among people who cannot tolerate unresolved time individually, which is why the opera feels, to me, less like a representation of “satyagraha” and more like a mild dose of it, enough to remind the body what the full thing would cost.
I’ll receive gracefully the last line, and I am grateful, Alexander.
Brilliant as always.
I admire the rigor of your thinking, and the way you allow experience to remain unresolved without diminishing it.
Attention itself as an ethical act. Not just endurance, not just holding the line but the refusal to let your attention be trivialized. In a world that constantly fragments us, to remain attentive to what hurts, to what is unjust, without converting it into quick meaning or consumable outrage… that feels like a deeper form of satyagraha. Almost like a precondition for it. Before the body holds, before the voice resists, attention decides what is worthy of being held at all.
Your writing does this. It doesn’t rush to resolve, it doesn’t decorate suffering into something legible, it attends to it, with a kind of intellectual and emotional integrity that feels increasingly endangered.
And the photos, there’s something profoundly coherent in them with what you’ve written. They witness. They carry that same suspension, that same refusal to collapse into spectacle. You can feel the duration inside them, the stillness that isn’t empty but charged. Its presence, extended.
Also, there’s something deeply moving in the fact that you were invited into this by one of the artists. Not just as a spectator, but as someone trusted to receive and translate, without translating, paradoxically. That kind of invitation is intimate. It says something about how your way of seeing is already in conversation with the work itself.
What you’ve written performs the same resistance to immediacy, and reading it, I had the rare feeling of being asked not to understand, but to stay. And I could have stayed for 20,000 words not only 2,000. Thank you, Tamara, for everything you write.
P.S. And I miss so much seeing the opera or ballet shows at Garnier.
The precondition point is also amazing because you’ve identified something the political tradition of nonviolent résistance rarely makes explicit. Before Gandhi could ask anyone to hold a position under pressure, something prior had to happen… the decision, made individually and then collectively, about what was worth holding. And that decision is attentional before it is moral. You cannot sustain what you have not first genuinely seen, not glanced at, not processed, not filed under the appropriate emotional category, but seen, with the full cost that implies.
Which is why the fragmentation is so precisely targeted, whether by design or by the logic of the system that profits from it. Fragment attention finely enough and the prior decision never gets made. Nothing accumulates sufficient weight to be worth holding.
The outrage is real but weightless, which is a combination that exhausts without producing anything durable.
The observation about Olivia’s invitation touches something I didn’t quite write into the essay… that being trusted to receive without immediately translating is its own form of relationship, and a rare one. Most of what passes for critical attention is really just rapid domestication with better vocabulary. To be invited as a witness rather than a reviewer changes what you’re able to bring back.
Come back to the Garnier when you can. Some rooms insist on being inhabited in person.
You write about art by metabolzsing it. Your essay behaves like Satyagraha… slow, recursive, disobedient to the demand for takeaway meaning. That’s a kind of artistic integrity most people only gesture toward.
Perhaps the real scandal of works like this is that they expose how addicted we’ve become to translation as control. We don’t just want to understand, we want to domesticate. Turn experience into captions, suffering into frameworks, resistance into “content” as you described in so many essays. The insistence on immediate intelligibility is managerial. If I can summarise it, I can file it. If I can file it, I can stop being changed by it.
And Satyagraha refuses filing. It lingers like an unresolved chord in the nervous system, which is precisely why it feels so politically subversive. It denies us the illusion that understanding is the same as participation.
You live inside it on the page. What a fabulous experience. And the Palais Garnier is for me the most beautiful opera house in the world.
Tamara, I could have read you for hours…
“Domesticate” is the exact word!! and it exposes something the more polite vocabulary of “interpretation” conceals. Interpretation still implies a kind of respect for the original; domestication is about rendering it safe, bringing it inside, making it sit. What the demand for immediate intelligibility really wants is submission. The work should not cost anything beyond the time allocated to consume it. “Satyagraha” refuses that transaction at the level of its formal DNA, which is why it produces in certain listeners not understanding but something more unsettling…. the sensation of having been inhabited by something that didn’t ask permission.
The unresolved chord in the nervous system is precisely it. And what stays unresolved is not the meaning but the demand the work makes, which doesn’t dissolve when you walk out into the night air. You carry it home like a low-grade fever that isn’t quite unpleasant enough to treat.
As for the Palais Garnier… there is something almost perverse about that particular friction, all that gilded self-certainty receiving a work designed to undo certainty. I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Thank you so much, Clara!
This is a stunning review. What a masterful piece of writing and such an apt reflection on our times as well as the opera.
What a generous thing to say, Jason! I am grateful you understood it exactly as I meant it.
Does Treading Water count as the “holding of a position over time”?
Only if the water is cold enough to make stopping genuinely tempting. The distinction I’d draw is between endurance that has somewhere to go and endurance that has decided, consciously, at some cost, that it will not be moved by the pressure to arrive. Treading water can be either, depending on whether you’re waiting for a boat or refusing one.
Excellent.
It is significant that Glass chose the period roughly overlaying Le Belle Epoque, that age of gilded resistance against rage, when a collective suspension of villainy was brokered. It was during this long, deep civilizational breath that Gandhi's concept of Satyagraha could grasp the air needed to inflate into something tangible. It seems as though it took a frame, the humiliating fall of the Second Empire on the one end, and the terrible Guns of August when, with one final, harsh attempt to banish threat and fear with force, on the other end, for the concept of Satyagraha to find the right register.
Prior to that, the western tradition might turn to the theological precedent of Job, that faithful son who in the face of absurd villainy refused the two resolutions Gandhi's third option overcomes, reciprocal villainy or victimized fatalism. Instead, with steadfast strength and active faith, he carved out his own response, something like Satyagraha. Job and his lineage understood that retaliation scales into trench warfare and that razing the ‘temples’ of tradition results in a collective shell shock and a modern nihilism. Satyagraha holds something much more elusive, but also something much more unyielding: a ferocious faith in the humanity of the human spirit.
Job, Jesus, Tolstoy, Gandhi, and Glass, and now this author, reject both standard modalities. If those two tendencies lead to destruction, what is this Satyagraha that holds the rage against injustice and builds something lasting? How does it process suffering without catharsis (the trenches)? How does it metabolize oppression without cynicism (modernity)? Firstly, it does not deny the conditions; the villainy is real, the rage is natural. Secondly, it does not suppress them; by 1914 Le Belle Epoque had revealed itself to be a temporary and false hope at best.
Satyagraha simply holds the oppression, standing firm, like a beach against a persistent tide, like a precipice against relentless gravity, like a beating heart against time.
It does not abuse nor merely endure. It reflects, both as a mirror to the oppressor with the active stillness of a psychological judo, and as a lens turned toward its own inner responsibility. In these ways, Satyagraha gives the rage dissipative energy without forcing it to be other than it is. It contains the tensions entropically. It centers rather than opposes.
An opera that swirls into unresolved progressions leaves the audience to dissipate meaning into being. Sound, movement, irresolute compositions dissolve constellations of certainty into fields of faith, not in something external, but of something living. Where oppression deconstructs, operatic Satyagraha builds solidarity with one’s quantum-like wholeness and finds sacred ground. Satyagraha, once understood, can be employed daily against the universal injustice common to all, one’s own mortality.
Bravo, Andrew! The Job parallel is one I should have seen and didn’t, which is the mark of a true generative observation. What Job refuses is precisely the two exits that his comforters keep offering: either you must have sinned to deserve this, or the universe is simply indifferent and your suffering meaningless. Both are forms of premature closure, one theological, one nihilistic, and Job rejects them both with a stubbornness that reads, in your framing, as “proto-satyagraha”. He will not be consoled into a manageable story. He insists on the full weight of the contradiction — “I am faithful, I am suffering, these facts coexist” — and holds it until something larger than either term responds. That is a form of demand made without violence.
And you strike again because the Belle Époque framing opens something I hadn’t considered. Satyagraha required a particular historical pressure gradient to become legible. Not the open barbarism of earlier centuries, where force answered force without embarrassment, but that peculiar civilisational suspension, gilded, optimistic, secretly essential collapse, in which a third option could briefly find oxygen. Gandhi needed the British Empire at a specific moment of its own self-contradiction, needing to believe itself civilised while behaving otherwise. Satyagraha inserted itself precisely into that gap between claim and conduct.
Your final turn, satyagraha as a daily practice against one’s own mortality, is where the argument achieves something beyond political philosophy. If the deepest injustice is the one no collective action can overturn, then the discipline of holding without resolving becomes a way of being in time. The beach does not defeat the tide. It simply remains a beach.
Thank you so much for your absolutely wonderful comment, Andrew!
The realm I'm writing in (motherhood, addiction, trauma) is very different but oh my gosh, this eloquent essay gave me that illusive feeling of truly being *seen*. One of my primary goals in my writing is the rejection of catharsis. (Tiny plug here, I'm working on a series of essays called "Say the Scary Thing Out Loud" which will be thoroughly steeped in this kind of anti-resolution but in the world of motherhood.) The challenges, struggles and realities of everyday life rarely end up resolved and put to rest. They seldom end, period. Just like the larger political, social and cultural arena. I absolutely despise the stories that we're told with tidy resolutions because people use them as a measuring stick and, of course, real life will never be able to compete.
Another commenter said it and it's absolutely true, there's nothing less marketable than refusing to take a side and respecting nuance. It's always been that way but started escalating around 2015 and has just gotten worse and worse. I don't understand how the people I know who are steeped in this toxic political "discourse" don't just scream and never stop.
Its a sad state of affairs in the US on so many levels. But whatever keeps the clicks, eyeballs and dollars coming in, I guess?
I had so much more to say but I am rambling here and I feel ridiculous. So, I'll just finish by saying thank you for sharing this experience of yours. It clearly struck a chord with me!
Don’t edit the ramble, Cappy, the best thinking often arrives in that register, before the self-censoring sets in!
The territory you’re working in is not different from mine in the way you might think. Motherhood, addiction, trauma are precisely the domains where the pressure to resolve is most violent, because the people around you need the story to end so they can stop being implicated by your continuing to live inside it. The tidy resolution protects the reader, not the writer. Rejecting it is an act of fidelity to the actual texture of experience, which rarely closes and never quite explains itself.
“Say the Scary Thing Out Loud” already tells me something about the stakes of what you’re building, that the refusal of catharsis there isn’t aesthetic preference but ethical commitment. The scary thing stays scary when you say it. That’s the point. That’s what most writing about difficult subjects defuses on the way to the page.
The 2015 escalation you name is real and I think underexamined. Something tipped…. not just politically but in the grammar of public feeling. The space for “I don’t know” or “both things are true and neither fully” effectively closed, and what replaced it was the demand for allegiance dressed as clarity.
I don’t think you’re rambling, honestly! I think you arrived at the precise thing and then got nervous about having said it. Don’t be!
You're very kind Tamara and I so appreciate the reassurances. I spent most of my life being talked over and through, when I wasn't just ignored completely. I've spent the last four years trying to undo the messages I internalized from being treated that way but sometimes I can't help myself. Kind of like a reflexive apology.
Sorry. (Lol.)
I had some words about 2015 but they've been lost ro the ether. I do remember I wanted to say thank you again for a great essay and a nice little exchange here in the comments. If only the rest of the internet could manage this, how nice it could be!
Dear Tamara …I don’t consider myself an intellectual … maybe a “sentimental” if that can mean anything… (you may have seen that in what and how I write) … and so your exposé of the Satyagraha really speaks to me with a very quiet but, oh so strong, voice.
The Camusian hero … alone ! … while Satyagraha requires company ! a collective effort … and “receiving through the body” … stillness … stay … hold on … hold fast … “hold the line” … (a phrase I used to encourage my production teams !) and more : do not retaliate ! a good answer to ambient Chaos! Standing in the middle of the square, facing the monster … but not enough … you say … “The sustained, unremarkable, unperformable holding of a position over time”.
I will not comment over your words, Tamara … but I am taking this as a message in view of what I am writing …so relevant …
The force … the myth … presence ! paying attention !
Some words that stood out in my world:
“The moral demand of nonviolence was unconditional, not strategic.
Not: resist because it will work. But: resist because to not resist is to have already lost something more fundamental than the immediate fight.
What we struggle to represent, and therefore to value, are the years of unglamorous collective endurance before the speech, the thousands of unnamed people who held the position without knowing whether it would be held long enough to matter. Satyagraha is an opera about those people,
The refusal to be moved, in both senses, from your position, and into someone else’s emotional economy of panic and reaction.
the sensation that it is possible to hold a position for a very long time without resolving it, and that this is not a failure to act but is itself a form of action.
I thought: this is what a civilisation that still believes in itself sounds like. I am not sure we sound like this anymore.
From a city that has always confused beauty with immunity, on the night after an opera that reminded me, without argument and without mercy, that the most political act available to us may simply be the refusal to let go of what we know to be true.”
Thank you so much for this gift. I will see it Friday the 24th. Letting it dig deep in my stomach and my soul …
The sentimental and the intellectual are not the opposites the academy pretends they are. Sentiment, properly understood, is what keeps thought from becoming merely clever, it is the insistence that ideas have weight, that they land somewhere in a body and leave a mark. What you describe in how you read, and apparently in how you write, sounds less like sentiment in the diminished sense and more like a refusal to let language remain abstract. That is not a lesser mode. It is, in some ways, the harder one. And I admire that.
I am happy that you will see it on the 24th.
The lines you lifted are the ones I’m glad survived the writing. Particularly the unnamed thousands, because history has a way of compressing collective endurance into individual biography, the great man at the centre of the stage, and what gets lost in that compression is the actual substance of what satyagraha is: not a quality of exceptional souls but a practice of ordinary people who decided, together, without guarantee, to hold.
Take it into your writing! That is the best use I can imagine for it.
Thank you so much, André!
being "merely clever" ! that's a good one ... it's exactly my feeling about French literary thought ... Ils ont de l'esprit ! Ah ! les beaux mots ... les belles tournures ... l'apparence, plutôt que simplement une vérité dites pour que tout puissent comprendre. Le vrai "esprit" (esprit comme âme) n'existe pas en France ... Quand on a de l'esprit ici, c'est qu'on sait jouer avec les mots !!!
Heureusement, il y a Camus, ou Hugo ... autrement ... pas beaucoup plus ! Traitre à ma patrie ! mais sans honte !
deciding to hold ... that's the thing ... may our future company of heroes hold the line ... et qu'ils puissent tous ensemble, créer le nouveau mythe ... nous verrons !
C'est vous que je remercie, Tamara ... j'ai beaucoup de chance que vous soyez là ...
je suis à 97 pages ... et maintenant, je dois tout revoir avec un nouveau regard ...
🦋💕
Je viens d'une famille de peintres ... la seule façon de vraiment "regarder" un tableau, est de le pendre assez bas ... pour que le coeur du tableau soit au niveau du ventre ... et là, il faut le prendre dans le corps ... in the body ... sans pensée sans mots ... just le tenir là ... to hold it ...
essayer de "comprendre" le tableau ne sert à rien ... il faut le sentir ... dans son ventre ... Rothko par exemple ...
“The body knows things about endurance…” feels like a description of nonviolence in practice.
That line really echoes what Mahatma Gandhi was doing, not just politically, but on a deeply human level.
Gandhi’s approach wasn’t just an idea or a moral stance. It was something lived through the body. Holding ground without retaliating. Staying present under pressure. Regulating the impulse to react, even when provoked.
That’s what made Satyagraha so powerful. It wasn’t passive. It required discipline, restraint, and a kind of physical and emotional control that most people aren’t trained to access. The refusal to strike back wasn’t weakness. It was a deliberate act that exposed injustice without becoming it.
And that applies beyond politics too. On a personal level, it’s the same principle. The ability to pause instead of react. To hold tension without escalating it. Whether in a conflict, a relationship, or a wider system, that kind of grounded presence has the power to shift things in a way force often can’t.
At the end of the day, I think true power comes from controlling yourself in a way that external influences are incapable of changing a humans compassion and love for the world 💛
The word “trained” in your reading fascinates me because it implies that what Gandhi was doing was not natural, not the expression of an unusually serene temperament, but the result of practice, repetition, the kind of disciplined rehearsal that produces capacity where none existed before. Which matters enormously. If nonviolence were simply a virtue some people possess, it would be admirable but not transmissible. The fact that it requires training means it can be taught, learned, built collectively, not just individually.
The final point you make is where I’d want to add one complication, if you allow me, not to resist it but to sharpen it. Controlling oneself so that compassion remains intact under pressure, yes, absolutely! But satyagraha at its most demanding asks something beyond self-regulation. It asks that the compassion extend to the one applying the pressure. Not as sentiment, not as performance, but as a genuine recognition of the other’s humanity even while refusing their terms. That is where most of us, myself included, find the limit of what the body has been trained to hold.
It is also, I suspect, where the truly transformative power lives… not in the refusal to strike, but in the refusal to stop seeing.
Thank you so much for this deep reading, Anita!
Wonderfully said Tamara. God Bless 😇💚
This precisely it, Tamara: "what remains possible is presence. The refusal to be moved, in both senses, from your position, and into someone else’s emotional economy of panic and reaction.". Brilliant. Here is my perspective, from this end of the Atlantic, in terms of how superficially devoid of feeling, art has become: https://peaisgreen.substack.com/p/madama-butterfly-and-an-ode-to-the
The phrase “superficially devoid of feeling” already tells me that the problem isn’t absence of emotion in contemporary art so much as the simulation of it, feeling performed at the surface so efficiently that nothing is required to go deeper. Which is its own form of the emotional economy I was writing against. Presence, as I mean it, is incompatible with that, you cannot be genuinely present and simultaneously curating your own reaction for an audience.
Grateful you always ready me so deeply!
Tamara, you are writing about my favourite of all, places!! As you know! And I have yet, to read your essay...which I will do so shortly!!! xx
Read it, Paulina, then come back, some conversations deserve to happen in the right order!
I was too excited!!! 🤣 I read it, wonderful.
Thank you :)
I think I am on firm footing to make this claim: words and language are rather important to you Tamara. As they are to me, but what I read here is an entreaty to let go the formation of concepts and words, let them slip away as a note or a twirling limb drifts from event to afterglow. That act of rigidly defining our reality by pouring experience into the vessel of languages as means to describe complexity, challenges, difficulty-at-large, and the myriad positive experiences joy, ecstasy, love, kindness et al. disrupts something in our fundamental understanding of reality—particularly when analysis through language is predominantly our method of communing with the world.
I always think about a statement I heard: the Catholic liturgy lost the flock as soon as it was translated to the vernacular. It delighted me to think that the power of the faith was transmitted through the poetry, not the story details; the intention and the musicality of the liturgical composition could be transmitted to a congregation— not with detail, but with a certain feeling tone. Which, when combined with context of the sacred space, primed the faithful to feel the spirit rather than analyse it. And your opera experience, made mysterious by the lack of language comprehension (note to Museguided scholars, there’s a language she doesn’t know) and how Glass transmitted something deep without force feeding it through clear direction and neatly resolved arcs is a version of that effort to keep a story mysterious. It sounds like You were held in thrall to a full sensory experience, rather than the blunt instrument of being told what is happening. How quaint!!!
There is probably some value in keeping a story mysterious. A story moves you deeper when you eventually learn what the message is after some additional toil.
I am chronically inept at hearing lyrics in a song when I experience it the first time. Indeed, if I can parse the lyrics on the first listen, I often lose immersion, and I don’t think I hear the song properly… I have probably missed a lot of good music I’d consider pop or simple, because I get wrapped around a simple lyrical story and I fail to see the whole magic of a track. However, if a musician can artfully bury a message under esoteric, occult imagery, and other such hard to parse layers of nonsense, follow that with a musical pattern based on the Fibonacci sequence— well! I will adore your music forever. But I digress.
I believe I have mentioned this to you before, Tamara, that one of the most prominent through lines I experience when reading your work is the notion that you are encouraging the reader to bring their discernment back from the mind to the body… and hopefully not to keep it there, but to have the felt experience as part of a holistic practice of becoming. This essay is the full bloom of that idea tethered to the framework of what sounds and looks like an exquisite experience at Place de l’Opéra— full of soul-force and the reification of that request to take experience out of the mind and feel the vibrations in the body.
Using art and literature to make this point feels like the sweet spot of your writing. Your effortless ability (“perceived ease”, I’m sure there is some toil on the backend of these essays :)) to weave the deep importance of music and poetry as a vehicle to elicit, in your readers, a deeper resonant experience above and beyond merely comprehending a story, is a wonder. For me, I take away from this essay, the idea that one should ingest art at multiple levels, with the intention to skillfully hold space for the body to involve itself in the afterglow of an artistic experience. This is a truly necessary salve for a world that has us consuming at double time.
And that double-time consumption isn’t just the result of a social media landscape that makes eye-watering amounts of money on getting you to consume more. It is also part of education and business. Getting things done swiftly, without pause is thoroughly incentivized in both domains.
Part of my joy at discovering your writing, Tamara, and with your friendly prompts, is the encouragement to read poetry for the first time, in a way that actually works for me—not a mad dash to the end, to say I’ve completed another great work! And as clumsy as I am at it, the experience is… hard to put into words, which is precisely the point.
I’ve been reading William Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell. I am taking it ever so slow. The book was a colleague’s at work, and when I asked her how she found it, she told me she has repressed it. Because she read it during her post-secondary schooling and it was part of a gauntlet of reading that she had to do. She didn’t enjoy it. She finished it.
I am enjoying it, and I think it is of the same register as your enjoyment of Satyagraha. By letting the ideas, musicality, imagery, movement, and eventually the underlying message, unfurl without grasping at meaning, this changes the colour of the experience. The insight deepens. The ideas take root and start augmenting the mind… a tall order in the 21st century when the mind is ferociously trying to show it has mastery quickly… not a lot rearranges within under those conditions of demonstrating mastery versus achieving it.
And yes, reading poetry slowly and methodically doesn’t grant immediate value, but it is a truly wonderful counterpoint to consumption environment that has, up until recently, well and truly upended my capacity to experience art and story at the level that actually moves me.
Taking in art as you describe it, Tamara, is a practice. Not a piece of advice to performatively nod my head and call it a day… it is effortful. It requires what a certain Soprano transmitted to you: art requires conviction.
Holding true to discomfort and joy; sorrow and ecstasy, experiencing these in ways that don’t feel like you are just about ready for the next thing… This is truly a sustainability habit for consumption. A kind of hygiene for ingesting the world in a way that works a different set of muscles than the double-time consumption incentivized by social media, education, and business. I immensely appreciate your writing and your thinking and how it has enabled me to re-work my consumption habits. I no longer retreat after an experience and start scanning for the next hit (not always… sometimes though… I’m still conditioned to some extent!). This though, is an ongoing practice. I am still learning.
It is nice to sit in a moment, not to resolve it immediately and just see what else erupts in consciousness, if you can just… let go…
Ohhh Adam, the Catholic liturgy observation carries more weight than even you’ve given it. What was lost in translation wasn’t accessibility, the vernacular made the content more accessible, which is precisely the problem. The Latin held the congregation at the threshold of comprehension, in that productive zone where the mind cannot fully grasp and therefore the body must take over. Mystery is not obscurantism; it is the condition under which something deeper than understanding becomes possible. The moment the story became fully legible, it became merely a story, subject to agreement, disagreement, boredom, critique. The untranslatable resists all of those exits.
Blake is the marvellous companion to this. Straight to my heart (I think you know how obsessed I am with him). “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell” doesn’t yield to the first reading because it wasn’t designed to, not out of difficulty for its own sake, but because Blake understood that the rational faculty, what he called Urizen, will immediately colonise any meaning it can extract and file it under what it already knows. The imagery has to be strange enough, the logic has to be sufficiently diagonal, to slip past that colonising impulse and land somewhere less defended. Your colleague who repressed it read it under precisely the conditions designed to prevent it from working: the gauntlet, the deadline, the imperative to finish. She encountered the words. She never encountered the book.
What you’re describing in your own reading practice, the deliberate slowing, the refusal to grasp, is not a reading technique so much as an epistemological reorientation. You decide, in advance, that mastery is not the goal, which is an extraordinarily difficult decision in a cognitive environment that rewards demonstrated comprehension above almost everything else. The educational system you mention incentivises speed and the performance of having understood, which is a subtly different thing and considerably more damaging. You can perform understanding without having been changed at all. The performance, in fact, protects you from the change.
The Fibonacci sequence aside made me smile, not because it digresses but because it doesn’t! What draws you into music that buries its logic under layers of resistant imagery is the same thing that held you inside Blake, the same thing Glass engineers over three hours of Sanskrit and harmonic circles. And that is the refusal to make comprehension easy enough to substitute for experience. The song you can parse on first listen has already given you everything it has. The one that withholds something keeps generating, keeps working on you in the hours and days after, keeps recalibrating things you didn’t know you had in your mind.
The distinction between demonstrating mastery and achieving it is the malt fascinating for me because it maps so precisely onto what satyagraha asks politically. The activist who needs to be seen resisting is demonstrating. The one who holds the position whether or not anyone is watching is achieving something… slower, less legible, infinitely more durable. Both in art and in politics, the performance of the thing and the thing itself have become so confused that we’ve largely lost the ability to distinguish them. Which is why an opera in Sanskrit, a poem that resists first reading, a political résistance that refuses the spectacle of confrontation feel, in the current moment, almost scandalously countercultural.
The fact that you are still learning, still occasionally reaching for the next hit, still working against the conditioning, that honesty is itself a form of the practice. The ones who claim to have mastered slowness have almost certainly missed the point.
I feel seen and felt and understood in your comment, and for this I’m the most grateful, Adam! What a gift this is for me!
Thank you for your answer. When I first read this yesterday I was overwhelmed with both resonance and recognition. I wasn't able to comment because things got busy here, so had to come back to it today. And just now as I reread it several times I noticed that it was about a collective experience.
In the essay you wrote, "What satyagraha demands, and what Glass’s opera enacts, is the refusal of both terms: neither the numbing nor the reactive noise, but the third option that our current media environment has made almost unimaginable. The sustained, unremarkable, unperformable holding of a position over time." I found in those words, the description of a lived experience for which I had had no previous way to express it - two experiences actually. A lifelong battle for control of my life with my mother, and the more recent struggles to find my way as a priest, when my view of who I should be and how I should be is so different from what the lineage/organisation wants and expects of me.
"...resist because to not resist is to have already lost something more fundamental than the immediate fight." This moved me deeply in both lived experiences of my own. And in these past months I've rediscovered part of myself that was so well-buried that I had forgotten what it was that was gone. I only knew something was missing in me that was essential, and that first response of yours to my comment gave me the clue that led to its discovery months later.
In the essay you said, "Simone Weil wrote that affliction becomes real at the moment the sufferer recognises the world’s indifference to their suffering. What remains possible after that recognition is the question. What remains moral. Glass’s answer, which is not an argument but a sonic fact, is that what remains possible is presence." This matches closely, if not perfectly with Ken McLeod's phrase in "An Arrow to the Heart," his commentary to the Heart Sutra, "compassion as presence." Since I first read that in 2008, the words "compassion as presence" have been a kind of motto or mantra for me. There are so many times no words can help, but simply showing up for someone and being there, being present, no matter how awkward or uncomfortable, is everything.
"I left the theatre not cleansed, not uplifted, but altered in some more obscure way, like a piece of paper that has been lightly dampened and left to dry. Something in my shape was different. The sonic repetition had done something to my sense of time, and the low-grade urgency I carry constantly had been displaced, not soothed but replaced, temporarily, by something more durable… the sensation that it is possible to hold a position for a very long time without resolving it, and that this is not a failure to act but is itself a form of action."
There is so much in this quote of yours. I read the first line and nodded, because I, too, had been altered. In my case, altered by your essay, and in ways I'm only just beginning to explore. I imagine my understanding of how it has affected me will unfold over time.
The last line, that holding the position "is itself a form of action" is like a call to arms. To put everyone on notice that action isn't always like an action movie. An oak tree grows slowly, almost unnoticeably, until suddenly you realise you are cool in its shade on a hot summer day, and you see it is mature.
I thought all of this might come across as arrogant, or as if I thought I was a collective all by myself (I'm not that foolish!), so your answer to my previous question made it possible for me to share this response. Thanks, Tamara.
The oak tree is the only argument I need. Growth that is imperceptible until it isn’t, shade that arrives without announcement, the tree indifferent to whether anyone noticed its decades of silent work. That is a more honest image of how change actually moves than anything the action movie provides.
The battle with your mother, the tension between your vocation and the institution that houses it are not private analogies to satyagraha. They are the thing itself, lived at the scale where most of us actually encounter it… not in public squares but in the long, undramatic negotiations between who we know ourselves to be and what the surrounding structure insists we become. The organisation, like the empire, depends on your eventual compliance. The refusal to comply while refusing also to simply leave, to remain present inside the contradiction without being dissolved by it, is precisely the discipline Glass spent three hours asking his audience to inhabit.
Ken McLeod’s phrase has been with you since 2008 and that Weil’s formulation met it here, and that kind of convergence is a form of recognition. Two different traditions arriving at the same irreducible fact: when words fail, when argument exhausts itself, what remains possible is the body in the room, present, undefeated, not performing comfort but offering something more durable than comfort. Witness.
Thank you for coming back with this amazing comment, Doc!
This essay was profound for me Tamara and I needed to sit with it and read through it a couple of times. You reminded me of a story I hadn't thought about in a long time, and this thought specifically brought me back "... the sensation that it is possible to hold a position for a very long time without resolving it, and that this is not a failure to act but is itself a form of action." There are times we might question where is the justice for evil, cruel, vicious atrocities that have plagued our planet, and I've been exasperated with the slow pace of human consciousness. This story comes from the documentary "Watchers of the Sky." One of the films narrator's, Benjamin Ferencz, was a prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials for the people responsible for the atrocities committed by the Nazis. He found meaning for the "long arc of the moral universe" with the example of Danish astronomer, Tycho Brahe of the 16th century who was seeking the meaning of the universe. Brahe had convinced the king to build him a laboratory allowing him to chart and record the placement of the stars. Twenty-five years later a new king came to the throne and questioned what Brahe was doing. Brahe just said that he was "watching the skies." The king asked why, and Brahe said that he had charted 97 volumes charting the movement of every one of those stars trying to discover the meaning of the universe, admitting that he hadn't found it yet. However, he believed that someday his 25 years of labor would prove useful and save a person in the future 25 years of labor. Ferencz ends the story saying that when the American astronauts landed on the moon more than 500 years later, they had with them the tables of Tycho Brahe. The charts remained accurate. As you brilliantly note, "Not: resist because it will work. But: resist because to not resist is to have already lost something more fundamental than the immediate fight."
Tycho Brahe watching the skies for 25 years without the satisfaction of knowing what the data would eventually make possible is the image I didn’t have for what unconditional action looks like across geological time. Not faith in a specific outcome, but faith in the value of accurate witness itself. The charts were useful five centuries later precisely because Brahe didn’t wait to understand their purpose before making them. He simply made them, with rigour, in the dark, for a future he would never inhabit.
Ferencz understood, standing at Nuremberg with the full weight of what human beings had done to each other still warm in the record, that the arc Martin Luther King borrowed from Theodore Parker is not a metaphor of consolation but a description of a mechanism, one that requires people at every point along its length to do their portion of the work without seeing the whole curve. Brahe couldn’t see it. Ferencz could only see a fragment. The astronauts completed a trajectory none of them originated.
The exasperation with the slow pace of human consciousness is one I share without reservation. But Brahe’s 25 volumes suggest something uncomfortable…. that the pace may be non-negotiable, that consciousness moves at the speed it moves, and that the only available response is to make the most accurate charts you can and trust that someone, somewhere, five centuries hence, will need exactly what you recorded.
That is not a comfortable thought. It is, however, a sustaining one. Thank you for all this, Susan! You extended my thoughts in a wonderful way.
"the sensation that it is possible to hold a position for a very long time without resolving it, and that this is not a failure to act but is itself a form of action." Is this only a collective thing?
No, and the question cuts exactly where it should! There is a private satyagraha that rarely gets named as such… the refusal to resolve a grief prematurely, to force clarity on a relationship that isn’t finished declaring itself, to convert an open wound into a lesson before it has finished teaching. We do this constantly, not from strength but from the unbearable discomfort of remaining inside something that has no verdict yet. The pressure to conclude is as much internal as social.
What I’d say is that the collective form requires the individual capacity as its precondition… you cannot hold a position together with others if you haven’t first developed some tolerance for holding it alone, in the dark, without the warmth of consensus to sustain you. Gandhi’s public endurance was built on an extraordinarily demanding private practice. The years of unglamorous internal work preceded the years of unglamorous collective work.
Where the individual and collective forms diverge is in what sustains them. Alone, you are dependent entirely on whatever private faith or discipline you have cultivated. Together, there is a different kind of fuel, the knowledge that others are also holding, which doesn’t resolve the difficulty but makes it bearable in a way that solitude sometimes cannot. Each form makes the other more possible. Neither is sufficient alone.
Thank you, Doc, for that question!