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Summer 1999 The circle of land known as Tesserville. That is the constant. The serene awe of that circle. Yet, even in that majestic calm, there is movement. The changing of the seasons in Nature. Each season bringing renewed hope to go forth. Move on. Bombs, wars, shootings, fear, loss. The world can certainly be overwhelming. At times, it all seems hopeless as our collective anger and rage spins out of control. At no other time does it seem so imperative to do the work of knowing and understanding our feelings. The teaching of creative and safe ways to release warning feelings of anger and rage has never seemed more important for our work at the IAM Center. The skills of communicating clearly, listening and understanding our children and each other, is vital work to make the world we live in a safer place.
We at the Center have just completed the new workshop, INNER AUTHORITY. It was an exciting workshop for all of us and I would like to share with you some of the fruits that we have been walking away with as participants. On the first night of the workshop we cooperated in making two lists. The first was an inventory of qualities, attitudes, and behaviors that the group believed were necessary for the exercise of Inner Authority. I was very much impressed with what came out of the collaborative effort. Therefore, I would like to share the lists with you: CONFIDENCE / AUTONOMY / HARMONY / SPEAKING UP / POWER / CONSCIENCE / COURAGE / CONVICTION / DECISION-MAKING / RESPONSIBILITY / SELF-KNOWLEDGE / AWARENESS / I AM / CERTAINTY / DETERMINATION / RISK-TAKING / INTUITION / TRUST / INTEGRITY / PATIENCE WITH SELF, WITH LETTING THINGS UNFOLD, WITH ACCEPTING THAT WHICH I CANNOT CHANGE / BALANCE / GENUINENESS / HONESTY / INDEPENDENCE / INSIGHTFUL WITH SELF AND WITH SITUATIONS. Then we collaborated on an index of the various factors, i.e. feelings, attitudes, behaviors that were regarded as blocks to the exercise of true Inner Authority: FEAR / UNCERTAINTY / LACK OF CONFIDENCE / "MAMA" / "PAPA" / DOUBT / NOISE / DEMONS / RULES / MIND-READING / OVER-RESPONSIBILITY / CAN'T LET IT GO / DEPRESSION / WORRY ABOUT GETTING IT RIGHT / TOXIC FEELINGS / SHAME AND EMBARRASSMENT / FEAR OF HUMILIATION / GUILT / I CAN'T / YOU SHOULD / WORRY ABOUT WHAT OTHERS WILL THINK, FEEL, DO / EXPECTATIONS / PERFECTIONISM / SEEING GLASS HALF-EMPTY / TOO FULL / "THEY WON'T LIKE ME" / BUSYNESS / NEED TO BE ACCEPTED / SELF-IMPOSED CONSTRAINTS: TOO OLD, YOUNG, FAT, UGLY, SKINNY, TALL, SHORT, TOO STUPID, NOT SMART ENOUGH, I'M A WOMAN (MAN). By the time we came to the end of the workshop, these were some of the conclusions that the participants came to that they agreed would be necessary to truly achieve a well-rooted sense of Inner Authority: (1) To realize and keep perpetually in mind that, to operate out of a
place of true Inner Authority, I must be who I am, aware of my uniqueness
and value as a person. Of course, I am only packaging in words what was a wonderfully rich personal and communal experience for the participants of this early Summer workshop. With this reflection on the more cognitive aspects of this workshop, maybe you can join us in the near future for a full, enriching experience of your own!
Some people--Jews and non-Jews alike--can occasionally be heard to speak of "celebrating" the Holocaust. They don't mean with a picnic or a parade. They mean with as solemn a memorial as the heart can contrive. Lest we (lest anyone) forget. Though the Holocaust lasted for many years, a date in the spring has been chosen to stand for all of them, partly because spring means hope, and hope means life, and...and life is beautiful. Along comes Roberto Benigni and fairly sweeps his way through the world of popular culture by making a film set in an extermination camp under that title: Life Is Beautiful. He wins an Oscar as best actor. His movie wins another as best foreign film. And his composer, Nicola Piovani, yet another for best dramatic score. Before that, the film had won numerous awards and was a box-office triumph. Yet it has also disturbed thousands--especially Holocaust survivors and their descendants. The film, they say, is about a subject too full of horrors to play light with. Some are saying it is a travesty, and should never have been made. Or worse, it emerges as a kind of Holocaust denial--as if by mocking the event, the film diminishes it and makes it easier for revisionists to claim it never happened. Benigni himself is a working actor, and a comic from the trenches: lean, pixyish, sallow-faced, impish, and endlessly inventive. Invention, imagination is his reason for being and provides the ultimate justification for the film. For LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL is a fable pure and simple. It demands we willingly
suspend disbelief for its entire course. That way, Benigni is free to
be as inventive as he can, and we are free to delight in its fun. Yet in such a setting, replete with soldiers and their dogs, fuming ovens, work gangs, and the like, Bernigni has the audacity--and the bravado--to play out his fable. He is both the co-writer and chief actor of the film. In it he is the father of a six-year old boy. Both are taken together to an extermination camp. The father is determined to shield his son from knowledge of what the camp is for. He improvises a game that only he and the boy are in on. A running score is kept. The grand prize is to be a tank--a real battle tank that will replace the wooden tank that was one of the boy's treasures. This improvisation, the game--an unforgivable audacity to some--is comic invention at its highest, and it is fleshed out with pieces of delightful business that are rooted in comic tradition. Benigni is a modern Chaplin; he is best as a classic neb who knows how to make victims transcend their circumstances, and art transcend life. To transcend is to rise above. This Benigni accomplishes many times over. His film rises above not merely the mundane but the grotesque, the terrible, the obscene. True to its form, the film ends with a "fabulous" miracle: the little boy gets his tank. Its arrival--in the vanguard of liberating American troops--comes with a roar that provides an epiphany only the most calloused can ignore. But, inevitably, some will ignore it. Transcendence appears to be too much for them. The Holocaust caused many to lose their faith in God, after all; they are not going to let a mere fable win them back.Their pain cannot be gainsaid. And yet... The "celebration" of the Holocaust occurs in April. Why didn't they choose February, or November, or some date (as if it could be found) on which the whole nightmare began? A guess is not difficult to contrive: one reason April was chosen was probably the desire to establish a connection with April 19, 1943. It was Passover - the Festival of Freedom. In the Warsaw ghetto, thousands of Jews armed themselves as best they could and went out to meet a vastly superior force. They were slaughtered. But their day lives. Like Bernigni's film it is a reminder that the year will always come to its spring, that spring means life, and that life –despite the unspeakable madness that surrounds us–is beautiful. Gil Aberg Gil Aberg has been a film writer and a science writer. He has written several plays and acted with on-and off-campus theaters. |
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