The Magnificence Still Comes Through

And now I continue my walking, recalling a writing from five years ago, which was also brought about because of thoughts related to... unimaginable suffering, and the paths that can follow from them.

"Babi Yar

I'm thinking. Yesterday, I was watching a television program about the Holocaust in Russia. They showed footage of women being stripped naked, forced to run down a ravine, then being shot in the back. Today, I'm reading a book, Grace Notes, by Bernard MacLaverty. It's about an Irish woman from a Catholic family. A clinically depressed pianist. Anatoli is telling her about Babi Yar, where thirty-five thousand men, women and children were shot and buried in a ravine.

There's a black smudge obscuring the last word in this sentence on page 127. I move it. 'kill-' becomes 'killed.' Upon closer inspection, the black smudge is really a small, dead fly.

I close the book, and I'm thinking about someone else. I remember the way her voice sounds in my head as I go to check my laundry. She's Catholic, and not Irish. Loves music. We talk about God, and life, and death, and politics, and hate, and love. We could talk about the sad, transposable irony of the phrase, "German liberation of Russia" that I heard in that television program. Then about the poem by Evtushenko, about the bodies in the ravine.

About the people in the ravine.

Shostakovich put it in a symphony, says Anatoli, the guy speaking in this novel. I open the book again. The smudge has moved. The dead fly has moved. Now, it's under the sentence: "But the magnificence still came through."

I think about the Blues. Choirs and Coventry carols. Swing Low Sweet Chariot. The pianist from a Catholic family has a baby. A beautiful little girl. When she was a little girl herself, she loved Protestant drums, and when she grew up, she put them in a symphony.

I'm thinking: I'm not Catholic. Not Protestant. Not Nazi or Jew. Not Russian, not Irish. Not black.

Not a smudge. Not dead.

I'm thinking about someone else, and me and you, and about the music, and how the magnificence can still come through."

Now I've promenaded through present and past.

Next,

I'll feel for the future

Reflecting (just for a moment)

On why this is all relevant again to me now.