Fire Weather: The Making of a Beast - Review of John Vaillant's book by Peter Morgan
Updated: Nov 3
A review by Peter Morgan
“Wildfire is the most versatile and whimsical of disasters. Able to self-generate from a single spark, explode like a bomb, turn on a dime and fly over obstacles…. Fire possesses an unparalleled capacity for random movement and rapid growth (John Vaillant)
It’s the evening of August 16, 2023. I’m sitting on my lawn in the Upper Mission neighbourhood of Kelowna looking across Okanagan Lake at the wildfires as they move rapidly along the West Kelowna hills. By coincidence, I’ve just finished reading John Vaillant’s new book entitled Fire Weather: The Making of a Beast. Vaillant, a resident of Vancouver, predicts that if you live in places such as British Columbia, a wildfire – “the beast” - could well be coming. And sooner than you think. I’m stunned that ‘soon’ has suddenly turned into ‘now’.
I look again across the lake through binoculars. I’m hit with a huge mix of thoughts and emotions. The wildfire is, for example, a spectacular show of nature. The line of huge flames creates an hypnotic kind of orange glow along the lines of the hills. I’ve just been told that crowds are gathering on this side of the Lake to take it all in. A bit like Canada Day. But of course, it’s not a celebration. I can’t imagine the feelings of people watching the flames approach their homes, possessions and memories of a lifetime. And the anxiety of firefighters who are risking their lives to fight this thing as I sit there and watch.
I’m also fearful. After reading Vaillant’s book, I’m sure this fire will easily leap over the Lake and threaten Kelowna. And if the wind is right, it will have the power to advance on the downtown. At the very least, it will be able to spew live embers all over the city. The cedar hedge just to my left could easily explode in flames once ignited. And I’m exasperated. It is said that it’s the totally unexpected event – the ‘black swan’ – that people find the most difficult to address. But the reverse may be true especially when it comes to climate issues. People find it difficult to summon up the collective effort needed to address a threat that has been analyzed, understood, debated and predicted for decades. The systems it must overcome are too entrenched.
Back to the Vaillant book. It’s worth the effort to read it especially if you live in The Okanagan. He looks at three main subjects: the emerging nature of wildfires in the 21st century, the history of climate denial and delay and most importantly, the incineration of Fort McMurray, the fourth largest city in Alberta, and particularly, the events of May 3, 2016, when nearly 100,000 people were forced to flee in what remains the largest, most rapid, single-day evacuation in the history of modern fire. Vaillant’s book is one of a number of new books, for example, Edward Struzik, Dark Days at Noon: The Future of Fire and Jeff Goodell’s The Heat Will Kill You First, Life and Death on a Scorched Plant that are trying to warn us how and why we got to where we are. Vaillant’s book has been getting wide attention and has been nominated for a National Book Award in the United States.
Here’s a second suggestion. Take a deep breath before you start it. Read it only if you can deal with a new level of climate anxiety. His basic message is simple, brutal and ominous. A lethal brew of climate warming threats, especially in the form of heat and fire, is bringing an ‘Age of Fire” which will affect us all.
The book contains a wealth of stories and insights which can’t all be covered here. Three stood out for me.
The increasing ferocity of wildfire
This book will change the way you think about the idea of ‘wildfire’. The 21st century version, the ‘beast’ in Vaillant’s terms, bears little relationship to its kinder, gentler fire cousin of the last century. Vaillant describes the Fort McMurry fire as “a hungry and motivated adversary intent on maximum mayhem”.
Today’s version of wildfire emerges out of a combination of factors connected to a changing climate – falling humidities, rising temperatures, huge increases in fuel loads, extended droughts and a wider range of ignitions. The landscape of The Okanagan, for example. is now much more conducive to large, high-intensity blazes over longer periods of time.
Wildfires at full strength can now generate glass-melting heat, explosive growth and random movement. They burn with greater intensity than at any time in human history. Flames can be hundreds of feet tall moving rapidly from place to place. In some instances, a wildfire can generate its own weather in the form of towering pyrocumulous clouds which, in turn, can generate fire whirls, tornadoes and more lightening that can shower embers and ignite more fires miles away.
A wildfire of this type cannot easily be ‘put out’ in the conventional sense of that term. It can only be starved of fuel and energy. Structures in the way are not damaged. They are obliterated. Nothing remains standing as in the cases of Lahaina in Hawaii or Lytton. Live saving not fire fighting becomes the priority.
The return of the urban firestorm
Major urban fires used to be commonplace. Catastrophic blazes reduced large parts of big cities such as London (1666), Chicago (1871), Vancouver (1886) and San Francisco (1906) to ash and rubble. But major improvements in building construction and fire prevention/suppression techniques over the years shifted the threat of fire from urban to rural areas. The last major fire in a large Canadian city was in Toronto in 1904. In the process, people lost a sense of its damaging power. Fire became one more aspect of nature that humans had tamed and mastered.
No longer. The 21st century is witnessing the return of the urban inferno. Vaillant is at his graphic best describing the astonishing scenes inside Fort McMurray on that Monday morning as people suddenly had to confront a catastrophic situation they barely understood. (“that morning, the 88,000 residents of greater Fort McMurray were living in a parallel reality as oblivious to their environment as the passengers on the Titanic were to theirs”).
Families starting to go about their normal day would have to flee for their lives by mid-day. Vaillant describes the fire as almost semi-human, a ‘beast’ attacking the weak points of defence, rushing up and down streets searching ravenously for more fuel to consume. Whole neighbourhoods “giving way to fire like a beach town to a tidal wave”
A stunning impact of the fire was the ‘ashification’ of built structures such as houses, office buildings. Many were located in the ‘WUI’ (i.e. the wildland-urban interface) of Fort McMurray, the first part of the city exposed to the onrushing flames. Their construction and contents provided a ready supply of fuel for the fire in the form of gas, propane and compressed air tanks and household furnishings made out of petroleum products. Firefighters could only watch as houses incinerated in as little as three minutes. Many structures, filled with petroleum vapor created by the heat, would explode without warning.
The failure to change and adapt
Global warming has encouraged many new innovations in wind and solar power, home design and heating, electric vehicles and so on. And with a rapid adoption that was not imagined even 2-3 years ago. But most of these successful innovations emerged from market forces and human entrepreneurship. They did not have to contend with climate denial, misinformation, political resistance or the dilemmas of complex collective action.
Vaillant focuses more on the deeper ‘failures’ associated with global warming, i.e., the continuing rise in greenhouse gases, the increases in temperatures leading, for example, to the drying out of the boreal forest in Canada, the widespread pattern of drought, the intensification of storms, floods and fires. He is saying that the climate and the ecological systems – everywhere – are changing faster than humans are adapting. The societal collective action needed to address these failures remains too little and too late. Countries such as Canada and regions such as The Okanagan are putting themselves further and further behind in the climate race and at greater risk. Vaillant asks if we have passed some key ‘tipping points’ with respect to fire weather.
It’s a week after that Thursday night. I sit on my lawn again looking across the Lake at the hills in West Kelowna that are now largely dark. The immediate danger at least to Kelowna has passed thanks to the courage and skill of the fire fighters. But I keep remembering the Vaillant book and its implicit warnings. And I wonder, and worry, about the future.
What actually happened last week? Was that fire always manageable or did the sudden drop-off in the winds and temperature save people in Kelowna from having to face a major urban fire?
Are these kinds of fires going to remain seasonal and intermittent or are we likely to see a repeat next year and the year after that? The Upper Mission in Kelowna (where I live) for example, is a classic ‘woodland-urban-interface’. How serious are the emerging risks and to whom in places like this?
People in The Okanagan, including me, have managed to maintain their well-intentioned complacency about climate issues despite the 2003 Kelowna fire, the Fort McMurray crisis and the 2017 wildfire season. From what I see, we remain unprepared to deal with a major urban blaze. Will we ignore yet another ‘wake-up’ call and just go back to business as usual?
Managing to be ‘fire resistant’ or to ‘co-exist with fire’ isn’t going to be easy. We’re going to need new approaches to forest management, evacuation, municipal government, urban planning, fire fighting, home design and all the rest. Can we summon up the will and capacity to do those things? And at the scale and speed that will make a difference?
What might be the role for citizens like me? How should I go about making a contribution? To the city of Kelowna? To my neighbourhood? To my own family?


There’s an amazing book shop in Baltimore, Atomic Books, every time we go there we buy another amazing find. The next time we are over state-side we will be rummaging through their bookshelves. Among the hundreds of books, we found Kate Beaton’s Hark! A Vagrant! book about a year ago and love it to pieces. Once we start reading it, it was impossible to put down!
Hark! A Vagrant! is a collection of comics exploring some historical fan fiction. She makes history really fun, there are general historical references but more importantly Canadian historical references! We do not know enough Canadian history. There are also some great nods to feminism in her collection which are far more hilarious than that intro would suggest.
Kate Beaton is one of the coolest comic illustrators today. Her blog, Hark! a Vagrant! is the best for seeing her imagination at work, a lot of the posts are sketches, straight from the book. The posts are funny and loose and smart.
A personal favourite:
Kate Beaton: Thank you for making us giggle!


No Hope, No Fear
Published in the Newsletter for Spiritual Care Providers of Manitoba, February 2007.
In Pali, the North-Indian dialect that the historical Buddha spoke, “apekkha” is the word usually translated as hope. This is something of a mistranslation, a product of the Judeo-Christian conditioning of the Western scholars who first translated the ancient Buddhist texts. The literal translation of apekkha is waiting for or looking for.
Buddhism, at its core, is not a religion and not faith-based. Rather it is a system of mental development, the first intention of which is to achieve a deeper understanding of how the universe works. “I analyze, I do not philosophize,” the Buddha said.
Two great streams of mental development are nurtured with methods refined over millennia by accomplished practitioners. The first of these is Vipassana, or Insight. The microscopic investigation of experience with a mind sharpened by Insight practice reveals that our ordinary notion of time is an illusory concept, an organizational convenience. All experience is seen as being created in the present moment. The past is understood to exist only in memory and the future is recognized as entirely speculative. The concentrated mind does not engage in speculation, nor is it preoccupied with dreaming of a non-existent past. The second great stream of development is Summatta, which means equanimity, balance, and peace. The mind well-tempered by Summatta practice is steady, compassionate, patient and tolerant.
All practitioners are taught to develop insight and compassion together. The idea is to achieve a clearer understanding of the present moment so that when an action is initiated, the consequences are more likely to be wholesome and thus beneficial for the practitioner as well as for other beings. (The Buddhist view is that a mental action is identical in weight, substance, and effect to a physical action.) In this way, Buddhism teaches that it is more useful to turn away from the passivity of hope – waiting for, looking for – and turn towards the creativity of intention and aspiration. Aspiration is derived from the Pali word asassa, which means breath, breathing, sign-of-life. Aspiration is the direction of the life-force.
Fear is fixation on the likelihood of bad outcomes; consequently fear cannot exist if the mind is completely focused on the present moment. Hope is fixation on the likelihood of good outcomes; consequently hope cannot exist if the mind is completely focused on the present moment. Fear and hope are related, since both are forms of wishful thinking that pull our physical, mental, and emotional resources away from the present moment, the moment where actions are undertaken and the basis for outcomes of any sort are established. When actions are formulated by a mind preoccupied with fantasies of the future, good or bad, the likelihood that actions will be animated by wisdom and compassion is reduced.
A truly accomplished mind exists in a state of compassionate clarity, regardless of circumstances. Actions are motivated by wisdom and kindness. Outcomes are useful, helpful, and full of love. But what about the rest of us? The advice from the accomplished ones is that we can all aspire to achieve the state of compassionate clarity by committing right now to ethical, energetic, and loving thoughts and actions as best we can. The developmental process is never ending; even the Buddha himself had a meditational practice.
My teacher, the Ven. Namgyal Rinpoche, one of the first Westerners to be recognized by the Dalai Lama and other Buddhist leaders, was once asked “What is the relationship between trust and enlightenment?” Rinpoche answered, “Complete trust is complete enlightenment.” The Pali word for trust is saddha, often inaccurately translated as faith. Saddhana is a Sanskrit term related to saddha that means method of attainment. This trust, in the Buddhist view, is not a passive state, but an active, confident, and creative engagement with method. And in Buddhism we have lots of methods. We say pick one, and get started.
Many of you are pastoral professionals working in the health-care realm. So here are a few observations that will apply to some of the Buddhists you might encounter in your work:
The Buddha referred to old age, sickness, and death as the “Three Messengers”, meaning that trouble is a wake-up call. This call often comes too late for those that are not accomplished in the developmental practices described above. Buddhists like these are believers, that is they recognize the Buddha to be a great teacher, a god even, and they subscribe to a measure of magical thinking by hoping (hope in the regular North American sense) for positive outcomes brought about by unseen forces. Should one of these people receive a wake-up call from one or more of the Three Messengers, they will also experience the dark side of hope, namely fear. These people will find comfort, as would anyone, in the kindness of caring professionals, family, and friends.
More rarely, you will encounter a long-time practitioner of Vipassana and Summatta. These people respond to the Three Messengers differently than do the simply devout. To practitioners, the wake-up call is a confirmation of the nature of reality, rather than a debilitating shock. How will you know these people? You will know them by the fact that you feel comforted in their presence, rather than the other way around.


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This took me a while to actually think about what to write for this. I know i could easily just come up with anything within a minute and write something, but this time i really took a deep breathe and a few moments to really figure out and wonder about this whole self-awareness campaign “Who is the best of you?”
I used to be rebellious girl who does not give a shit of the world, or anything around me. Regardless if it is friends, university, school, teachers or even families to say. I once came to a point to wonder what life is all about and thinking about ending my life there and then feeling useless and pointless of my very own existence. I know this isn’t any big deal and most of the people out there would be thinking “oh! another emo girl”. Well, to you i may be, but to me, it is a big thing. Everything was just in my head and i couldn’t think straight.
Friends used to laugh and talk around me where I used to be the left-alone anti-social girl. I do not deny i have “friends” but how many would actually go out with me and have heart-to-heart session? Maybe because i was this rebellious girl who didn’t give a shit, i was different than all the other girls who wanted to laugh and talk and go out. They never bothered asking me, so i never bothered joining them. (typical girl next door story right?)
Fast forward to now and why I am bringing all the past back to my topic of “Who is the best of you?” There is two person. My father and My Fats (i don’t mean literally fats, but my boyfriend).
Thos who knew me would know how much this two person mean to me. I use to hate my dad and even ran away just cause i couldn’t stand him. But all this, he made me strong for who I am today. How i am picky with words and questions, how i speak, how i talk, how i think and even how i communicate. That is all because of him. I wasn’t always a daddy’s princess or a daddy’s little girl because he had never spoilt me. If not I would be living maybe in Solaris and driving a BMW already right?? But because of his strict disciplinary, I have became part of him. So i sometimes can be quite anal at certain think (Fats clearly understand this). Dad has told me “Life is a never ending journey of lessons”, we learn new things from the day we were born till the very day we die. He says “Well, we learn to walk, to talk, to laugh and to cry, and upon everything else, we even learn how to die right?”
The same as every other girl who says “my dad is my hero”, mine is extraordinary. I am proud to have him as my dad, and i hope one day, he would be proud of me as well. I go out meeting people and whenever i say his name, they all know him and start praising what a great man he is or how he has helped them, or someone they knew once upon a time. I hope, that one day, he would be able to go out and hearing from others how i am and he would be proud of me.
My fats, oh this fats, is someone who changed my world upside down. He was the reason, i went home more. He was a younger version of my dad, just maybe some of the personalities and opinions, he still has to grow. But when it comes to stubbornness and certain jokes. They are the same. They always say “Find a guy who is like your dad”, well, i found mine. When i met him 7 years ago, I have just left home for university, and to be honest and embarrassed, i did not go home for almost 9 months. It was because of him, I went home more, and learnt to communicate more and accept more things than being a rebellious b****. I learnt anger management, i learnt to be less grumpy and agitated (i still am now. just less).
Fats is also a very curious person, so i would always read up things, ask things and learn things so when he ask me I can answer him or explain to him. Because I want him to be proud of him and 7 years ago, i didn’t want to lose him. LOL. Had to fight with the other girls out there right? So how?? HAHAHAA.
I am who i am today, thanks to the both of them. I started my makeup obsessed because of fats, i started learning up more because of fats also. My strength is them, my weakness is also them.
I improve myself everyday in every different aspect because of them. They are the one who brought the best out of me. So who brings the best out of you? Who pushes you to be the best or has inspired you in certain things or ways that you didn’t realised it. Even the smallest things matters.
I only have ONE photo of fats and dad together. in these 7 years,. LOL need to take more.
So this is just a short writing of who is the best of me. So who is the best of you? Join this self-awareness campaign now to appreciate your accomplishments and people around you. AND, by joining us, you stand a chance to be at our exhibition at THE CURVE on the 28th October till the 2nd November. It is the many seemingly small (and often unnoticed) everyday actions that reflect the best of you, and are monumental and worth celebrating. If you take time out to reflect, you will find #thebestofyou


Radnor Celebrates Read Across America Day
Special guests and staff visited the elementary schools to read to joyful students on March 2 in celebration of Read Across America Day. Visitors included School Board members, officers from the Radnor Police, district administrators, and RHS students. Students and staff also dressed as favorite book characters.
- Radnor Township School District
- Read Across America


1) I love to tell stories. Over the years, many of you have taught me how -- thank you!
2) Now, my job is to tell stories. Specifically, stories that share the truth about solar energy. I work at Sungevity! It's really fun.
3) Our founder just published a book -- it's called Rooftop Revolution. It's a big story about solar power, and why we need it everywhere, now.
It's a jaunty read -- he's a cheeky bugger from Australia and his accent shines through in his writing.
(And I helped design the cover! And I created the website! So chuffed :)))
4) We want to spread the word -- so we need your help making the book an Amazon bestseller!
Click to see it on Amazon
(WHY I THINK SOLAR IS AWESOME)
Because it's one of the few things that's good for the planet AND is in people's immediate personal interests!
Families are saving money on their utility bills today, and oops-wait-what also reducing their carbon footprint. It blows my mind. We're just trying to do something nice for this lovely blue planet.
If this sounds as good to you as it does to me, please buy the book!


Pressing towards the Mark! What is your Mark?
by Body by Candice
From where do you get your news?.
13 Brethren, I do not count myself to have apprehended; but one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind and reaching forward to those things which are ahead, 14 I press toward the goal for the prizeof the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.
15 Therefore let us, as many as are mature, have this mind; and if in anything you think otherwise, God will reveal even this to you. 16 Nevertheless, to the degree that we have already attained, let us walk by the same rule,[b] let us be of the same mind.


One's greatness is not in how much he knows but how many he educates with what he knows
-Joshua T. Scott
Joshua T. Scott is not just a person who knows a great deal or loves to learn but rather, he is a philosopher who engages actively in critical thought about big questions that have no obvious answers. He delights in exploring complex relationships and thinking more deeply about important, but often vexing, topics. Joshua creatively constructs new and pragmatic ways of living, governing, learning, conducting business, and negotiating healthy, 'win-win' conflict resolutions. His philosophy, postulates heightened consciousness that allows many people access to spiritual and intellectual knowledge. While developing critical thinking he takes part in various debates to increase his ability to think freely and critically to find ways to define and describe the fundamental structures and patterns of life, often by breaking them down into smaller components.
Joshua’s thoughts have the ability to touch on many different aspects of life, from the arts to creating supportive environments for people. He is credited with developing a teaching series titled " After High School What’s Next" to empower young kids to reach for success by making better decisions. In this teaching series he challenges students across Texas to stay kids and follow the path laid out for them by their parents. This series provides students with real life topics and challenges them to begin to think about life after high school before walking across the stage.
Children will enjoy reading the action packed stories beginning with the Creation of the World, to Noah and the significance of the Rainbow and Jacob the heel catcher and ending with the Israelites’ escape from Egypt. The biblical scenes are uniquely illustrated with vibrant colors and the characters possess various melanin complexions that all kids will enjoy.
Joshua along with his wife Veronique J. Scott, J.D., recently released Amazon’s #1 Children’s Book. Jo-Jo’s Bible Adventure which takes children on a fun and interactive journey with big brother Jonathan and little sister Jolie through popular Bible stories. Readers will learn bible stories through a unique storytelling voice accentuated with rhyming verses.
The need to see people of color represented in biblical books inspired me to become an author. To tell a story that children of color could relate to and be inspired to reach for the stars. Talent is not as important as hard work and dedication to a project. I knew that if I worked hard and created a product that I was happy with then the job was done!


Salomon the Little Salamander
Children's Book – France/England
Illustrations for a series of two Children Books, "Salomon the Little Salamander" by children book author H.G. Morice Young. The books were produced in english and in french.
Gail was a talented artist with work that included writing, painting, screen printing, and textile design. She also had her own line of handmade luxury silk scarfs. Check them out!
Sadly, she passed away September of 2020, but her artwork remains in the world and in the hearts of many.


Free full-text Online Journal
Pakistan Journal of Pharmaceutical Sciences (PJPS) is a peer reviewed multi-disciplinary pharmaceutical sciences journal. The PJPS had its origin in 1988 from the Faculty of Pharmacy, University of Karachi as a biannual journal, frequency converted as quarterly in 2005, and now PJPS is being published as bi-monthly from January 2013.
PJPS covers Biological, Pharmaceutical and Medicinal Research (Drug Delivery, Pharmacy Management, Molecular Biology, Biochemical, Pharmacology, Pharmacokinetics, Phytochemical, Bio-analytical, Therapeutics, Biotechnology and research on nano particles.
PJPS is abstracted and/or indexed in ASCI Database, AsiaNet, CAB Abstracts, CABI, Chemical Abstracts, EBSCO, EMBASE, EMRmedex, ESSCI, EVISA, GDPBM, Genamics, IMEMR, IndexCopernicus, IndexPharmacus, ISI, JournalSeek, MEDLINE/PubMed, NLM LocatorPlus, PakMediNet, PASTIC, PMRC, Pubget, ResearchGATE, SADCCT, SCIENCE Pakistan, SCImago, SCOPUS, Scribd, Serial Cited, SID, WebStatDomain and WorldCat.
Pakistan Journal of Pharmaceutical Sciences is Pakistani journal at the interface of chemistry, biology and medicine. It publishes original research and review articles from all fields of Pharmaceutical Sciences from authors all over the world. Its mission is to integrate the wide and flourishing field of medicinal and pharmaceutical sciences. PJPS is recognized by Higher Education Commission with “W” category and awarded Impact Factor 1.103 by Thomson Reuter in 2011 and still holding Impact Factor.
The journal accepts manuscripts in English only.
Submission of manuscripts
Manuscripts are preferred for submission electronically.
e-mails: email@example.com and firstname.lastname@example.orgThe Pakistan Journal of Pharmaceutical Sciences is published bi-monthly by the Faculty of Pharmacy, University of Karachi . All correspondence should be made to Editor-in-Chief.
|Volume||Issue||No. of articles|
|Original Articles||Reports||Short Communication||Reviews|
Following is the list of all articles published. Click below to view more.
Year-wise publications from 1988 to-date


The AnyBook Award
Top Ten and Winners
Espresso Book Machine
|The American Book Center|
EBM on NOS Radio 1
The AnyBook Award Competition 2010
We would like to thank all our contestants for their hard work and for all the inspiring entries. Thanks also to our Judges who read and viewed all the entries!
Our Espresso Book Machine was launched on November 26th, making our Thanksgiving even more special than it usually is! It was an honor to have the AnyBook Award Book be the first official book to roll off our new press.
Congratulations go out to our four winners:
1st Prize Em Angevaare for "1228: To Presume to Make New"
2nd Prize Veronica White for "Remember before..."
3rd Prize Roger Bonner for "World's New Makeover"
Public Prize Philippine Bulsing for her painting "Redesign the World"
And, here they are, all the submissions that won a spot in our AnyBook Award Book:
"The Maze" by Stephanie L. Ragghoe
"Remember Before…" by Veronica White *
"Baby Shopping" by Andy Crane *
"Redesign the World" by Philippine Bulsing *
"Ppaperback" by Sjef van Gaalen
"Experience Innovation" by B. Joseph Pine II
"Redesign the World" by" by Sylvia van Bruggen *
"Redesign the World" by Jeroen Denters & Cunera Joosten *
"Redesign the World" by Wisarut Wivekyolamal *
"Where Do Lost Bits Go?" by Rick Vermunt
"World’s New Makeover" by Roger Bonner *
"Redesign the World: the inner solution" by Femke Wijdekop
"Redesign the World" by Joakim Drescher
"1228: To Presume To Make New" by Em Angevaare *
"Life Redesigned" by Mimis Chrysomallis
"The Wicked Wet World of AmsterSam" by Sam Martino *
"Demispheres" by Herman Duchenne
"In the Beginning… All Was Changed" by Marianne van der Wel *
"Insula Dei" by Pieter L. Harreman
* = top ten submissions
The very first book to be printed on ABC's Espresso Book Machine will be very special: It's going to be written by you!
Be a part of this printing revolution and help ABC publish a unique book by creating something for us on the topic Redesign the World (the theme of this year's PICNIC conference). You can write any sort of text, or conjure up any sort of image: we'll consider anything and everything as long as it looks good in black and white. (for example: prose, poetry, interview, essay, cartoon, photograph, drawing)
A professional jury will select finalists from all your entries. We’ll post these here on AnyBookAward.com so that you can vote for your favorite too. The final decision will be made by the jury, who will select the best quality entries to be compiled into our first book. You could see your work in print and on sale in our stores in November!
Theme: Redesign the World
* your own words in any form: essay, short story, poem, interview, play
* 1000 word maximum
* written in English
* your own graphics (illustrations/cartoons/manga/photographs) on the theme should be suitable for b/w printing
* scanned artwork should be scanned as grayscale at 300dpi, scaled to appropriate size saved in TIFF format
* total size of artwork should not exceed size A4
Send your submissions digitally to firstname.lastname@example.org as attachments.
Only Word, PDF and TIFF files are accepted.
You may enter more than once.
Be sure to include your full name, address, telephone number and title of your entry.
The Competition is now closed. Original authorship must be asserted. There will be no correspondance with the judges. Please do not send submissions by any means other than electronically.
We'll also be awarding prizes to the most outstanding entries:
* First Prize: 100 Euros worth of ABC Gift Vouchers, a weekend writing course with The Amsterdam Writing Workshop and ten copies of the book.
* Second Prize: 50 Euros worth of ABC Gift Vouchers and five copies of the book.
* Third Prize: 25 Euros worth of ABC Gift Vouchers and five copies of the book.
* Public Prize: 100 Euro Voucher to print any book (including your own) on the Espresso Book Machine.
* The 4 prize winners will all go to lunch together with a leading publisher, and will win free participation in a workshop on "How to Publish Your Own Book".
Everyone whose work is selected will get a free copy of the book too!
The first copies will be presented on November 25th, Thanksgiving Day, to Jason Epstein, eminent American publisher, co-founder of The New York Review of Books and the inspirational driving force behind this revolutionary printing machine.


Tomorrow~ A PoemIf I were to disappear tomorrow,Tomorrow~ A Poem by lightbleueyes
Would you remember me today?
If I were to say goodbye forever,
Would you finally want to stay?
If I were to be lifelessly still tomorrow,
Would you be with me right here?
If I were to end my days tomorrow,
Would you save me out of fear?
If I were to close my eyes tomorrow,
Would you hold my hand all night?
If I were to leave here tomorrow,
Would you make my life seem more bright?
If I were to say that I LOVE you today,
Would you say that you love me tomorrow?
Current Residence: philippines
Favourite style of art: anything
Operating System: windows
Favourite cartoon character: pocoyo
Personal Quote: i have "i".....i have "L"...i have "o"....i have "v"...i hav


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Vedanta prescribes 4 major paths (Margas) in order to attain and re-establish our connection to the One-ness and Universal Totality of All Life, which is also the essence of our innermost being.
Vedanta is one of the world’s most ancient spiritual philosophies and one of its broadest, based on the Vedas, the sacred scriptures of India. It is the philosophical foundation of Hinduism; but while Hinduism includes aspects of Indian culture, Vedanta is universal in its application and is equally relevant to all countries, all cultures, and all religious backgrounds.
The oneness of existence,
The divinity of the soul, and
The harmony of all religions
"For him who has conquered the mind, the mind is the best of friends; but for one who has failed to do so, his mind will remain the greatest enemy" - Bhagavad Gita 6.6
Raja Yoga means the “Royal Path.” Just as a king maintains control over his kingdom, you must maintain control over your own “kingdom”—the vast territory of your mind.
It’s the path of meditation, mantras, and techniques. The basic theme of Raja Yoga is that your perception of the Divine Self is obscured by the disturbances of the mind. If the body and mind can be made still and pure, the Self-will instantaneously shine forth.
Raja Yoga is the path most favoured by Westerners because it can be practiced by almost everyone requiring no belief or particular faith. Raja Yoga says to believe only what you find out for yourself through direct experience.
The Raja Yogi
Although he didn’t call it Raja Yoga, this path was best summarized by the Indian Sage Patanjali in the Yoga Sutras, under the title Astanga, or The Eight Auxiliaries/Limbs of Yoga.
The Eight Auxiliaries are:
Jnana Yoga (Gyana)
"When a man puts away all the desires of his mind, O Partha [Arjuna], and when his spirit is content in itself, then is he called stable in intelligence" - Bhagavad Gita 2.55
Jnana Yoga is the path of knowledge or, more correctly, wisdom. It is the means to Enlightenment through the process of reason—particularly the process of discrimination between what is real and what is not real, what is true and untrue—through study and self-inquiry.
It is said to be the most difficult path because it uses the mind and intellect to go beyond themselves to finally realize you are One with the Divine. The Upanishads (a collection of texts of religious and philosophical nature, written in India probably between c. 800 BCE and c. 300 BCE) call it the “razor’s edge,” where the ego is always trying to knock us off. It requires great strength of character, will power, and intellect.
The Jnana Yogi
Jnana Yoga is often mistaken as a path of studying scriptures, but it is not referring to that type of knowledge. In fact, it could be better translated as the Yoga of Knowing.
Through deep meditation the practitioner drops away all external attachments and all thoughts. They keep peeling away layers until they are unable to strip away anything more. At this point they will have discovered their True Self (Atman).
"Whoever offers Me with devotion a leaf, a flower, a fruit or a little water - that, so offered devotedly by the pure-minded, I accept" - Bhagavad Gita 9.26
This is the path of love and devotion. The subject, by immersing themselves so completely with devotion for their chosen object, merges into it. The subject and object become one - which is the Ultimate Truth (Brahman-Atman).
Bhakti Yoga is very open, and the object of the love and devotion can be anything or anyone. People often say they don’t have enough time for their spiritual practice because of family commitments. Bhakti is to make serving your family your practice.
With Bhakti, all attachments end except the all-absorbing love for God—this is the only attachment that frees rather than limits. Once the Divine is re-established in the temple of your heart, Its Love will serve you for eternity. Bhakti is the journey to finally “rest in God.”
According to Bhakti Yoga there are nine forms of devotion:
Although these are prescribed practices their performance should be done quite spontaneously, inspired by the devotion that the practitioner feels.
The Bhakti Yogi asks
The Bhagavad Gita is the first text to speak directly about Karma Yoga. In this Yoga of Selfless Service every action is turned into a spiritual act, and is a form of sacrifice. Any action or work done by the practitioner is done without any thought of reward, incentive or attachment to any outcome.
"You have a right to perform your prescribed duty, but you are not entitled to the fruits of action. Never consider yourself the cause of the results of your activities, and never be attached to not doing your duty"
- Bhagavad Gita 2.47
It is the path of selfless service (Seva). You cease to identify with the ego and all action is seen as an offering to the Divine. Through the selfless work the practitioner loses their own identity and all that remains is the ‘action’. It is the process of completely dissolving the ego or sense of self. The heart is purified so egoism, hatred, jealousy, selfishness, and similar negative qualities vanish, creating space for humility, pure love, sympathy, tolerance, and compassion.
Karma Yoga is closely tied in with the concept of reincarnation, and running through it is the idea that no effort is ever lost. Karma Yoga is “doing the right thing,”—the process of achieving perfection in action. It means following one’s dharma (true purpose) and accepting whatever comes, without expectation of payment, thanks, or recognition.
The Karma Yogi
The above are the four main pathways of Yoga, however we might consider including the below in this list. The number of paths and ways they are categorized varies enormously from source to source.
We'll look at Hatha, Mantra and Tantra Yoga in an upcoming blog piece. Any questions, please let us know in the comments below! Our 6 Week Beginners Yoga course is the perfect place to start if you would like to delve into yogic philosophy more.
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Just like you we are constantly learning about yoga, health and wellness. We love sharing our knowledge, musings and favourite healthy recipes - let us know what you think!


Nike co-founder Phil Knight will be telling us the history of Nike through his eyes in a new memoir. The Scribner imprint of Simon & Schuster Inc. told The Associated Press on Monday that Knight’s book is scheduled for spring 2016.
It’s been documented that Knight has been reluctant to talk about Nike’s history, but he says that he’s ready to open up now that he has more time to do so.
“For a long time, I have had requests — from a couple of prominent publishing houses and many diverse individuals — to write the story of how Nike began,” he said. “I had neither the time nor the inclination — until the last couple of years. Giving up more and more daily responsibility, I have found the time and the perspective. Or said another way: If I didn’t do it now, it wasn’t going to be done at all.”
The upcoming book has no title yet but it was revealed that it will touch upon such controversies as working conditions at factories overseas. However the main focus will be the early years of Nike. Who better to tell the story than the man who created and lived it, right?
Are you excited to read Knight’s book and learn more about the history of the Swoosh? Let us know down below.


Author Curtis Chin on new memoir “Everything I Learned, I Learned in a Chinese Restaurant” – CBS News
Across the country, vibrant Chinatowns have been a place for immigrants to land, establish roots and grow businesses, but forces like gentrification, real estate development and more have threatened such areas. In his memoir, “Everything I Learned, I Learned in a Chinese Restaurant,” author Curtis Chin, who was raised in Detroit’s Chinatown, details those forces and how they impact such communities. Dana Jacobson has more.
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I have slipped into a desolate place. My life as a hero, as a Nord, as an innocent drifter has changed. When other?s look at me, they fear me; I have hidden the truth under a Dwarven helmet for some time. Now, It doesn?t hide the truth anymore, I am hated on appearance; I am not human anymore; I am a vampire.
It all started while I was wandering in the mountains I came across ?Bleak Falls Barrow?. I entered the chambers for who knows what; just an adventure? After a short time in the barrow I encounter a vampire; the battle does not lead to my end, but rather, one strike from his cursed blade leads to a new beginning ? a nightmare. This new encounter sways my adventurous spirit some, and I exit the barrow.
The first people I encounter would tell the story of my fate; ill favored, and fighting for my life, I knew I would have to adapt. I found that I was stronger at night. Stronger and hungry, I would have to feed on human blood; I would also need to hide my pale face and whitened dead eyes. A full face helmet would do the trick, at least for a while and only a while as it turned out.
After some time had passed, I learned to hide my secret fairly well. I even returned to Whiterun to serve some time in prison for past offenses. My intention was to meet the Jarl, a quest I had avoided at one time during my travels. I served my sentence without exposing my curse, and soon after, located the ?Jarl of Whiterun?.
The Jarl requested I speak to his mage; his mage in turn sends me on a quest to find the ?Dragonstone?. And where does he want me to travel, to Bleak Falls Barrow, where my nightmare first began. I knew where I was going, and at least this time, I knew why. In my travels I had even found a way I could reverse my fate as a vampire. A man named ?Falion? had told me to find a black soul gem. The gem would have to wait, I wanted to do something right, and get the Dragonstone. I quick-traveled to Bleak Falls Barrow.
After much time traversing this dark, damp, and decrepit cave I come upon a huge wall, and start hearing chanting. I absorb a ball of light as the chanting gets stronger. Suddenly, a casket bursts open and a skeleton draped in a ragged cloak begins its furious attack. After fighting tooth and nail, and with the expenditure of many potions, I am victorious in battle. After searching the skeletal remains I find the well-earned Dragonstone.
I ran back to Whiterun as fast as possible, and I delivered the Dragonstone.? The mage accepts it and says I am no longer needed. I begin to walk out as one of the Jarl?s guards storms into the room and demands my help; a dragon is attacking the western watchtower. I accept and follow her to the Jarl. There he gives me a Dwarven shield that can block flame; I graciously accept this as even my Dwarven armor can?t protect me from the flames of a dragon.
The guards of Whiterun and I run to the watchtower to see if there are any survivors. We looked in horror as there burnt carcasses were strung across the ground.? The grass sizzled underneath my feet. ?I heard a roar from a distance and I knew that it wasn?t over yet. A huge dragon with blood sprayed on its face landed right in front of me. I quickly threw up my shield and blocked its flames as I ran to the ruins of the tower. I climbed to the top where I took out my Dwarven bow and arrows, and begin shooting. After a lot of shooting, blocking, and dodging, the dragon was nearly dead. I shot the beast square in the head and jumped from the tower, jumped on the dragon?s neck, and snapped it with one swing of my mace.
The dragon was now dead, and it began to quickly decompose. As its flesh seemed to vanish into thin air, a glowing light poured over from it, to me. Afterwards, I was able to release a mighty shout, and push back or destroy anything in my path. The guards began calling me the ?Dragonborn?. Things were really looking up, or so I thought.
I went back to the?Jarl and he then gave me the ?axe of Whiterun?, a Dwarven axe with frost powers. I walked to the door and met Lydia a warrior girl who was to be my companion for the rest of the journey to discover my Dragonborn gift. We walked outside and guards started attacking us because I was a vampire, a demon. Lydia and I made it out alive and are now on a quest to find a black sole gem to reverse my unlucky state of how shall we say ?life? or ?death??
It is not to complain in these harsh surroundings; it is not to complain at all really, I’m only playing a game. I could just revert to an earlier save point and get rid of this curse. But that wouldn?t be right would it? No, I will have to push on and overcome this misfortune; and at least now I have a companion to help me.


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Peeta says it will be ok
All I want to do is collapse on my metal plate. But I can hardly do that after what I just witnessed. I must be strong. I owe it to Cinna, who risked everything by undermining President Snow and turning my bridal silk into mockingjay plumage. And I owe it to the rebels who, emboldened by Cinna’s example, might be fighting to bring down the Capitol at this moment. My refusal to play the Games on the Capitol’s terms is to be my last act of rebellion.
So I grit my teeth and will myself to be a player.
“I hear Warner laugh.
I see him smile.
It’s the kind of smile that transforms him into someone else entirely, the kind of smile that puts stars in his eyes and a dazzle on his lips and I realize I’ve never seen him like this before. I’ve never seen his teeth—so straight, so white, nothing less than perfect. A flawless, flawless exterior for a boy with a black, black heart. It’s hard to believe there’s blood on the hands of the person I’m staring at. He looks soft and vulnerable—so human. His eyes are squinting from all his grinning and his cheeks are pink form the cold.
He has dimples.
He’s easily the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.
Vampire Academy: Christian Ozera
↳ HQ Stills
Of course we will go into this as one.
“For there to be betrayal, there would have to have been trust first.”
You think you’re in control, but you don’t understand how much you’re wrong.
“I've learned a lot about how people have to fight through their whole lives just to be themselves.”
One of the first pieces of advice I was ever given, on my first job was, “You should always buy something to treat yourself to say ‘Well done for getting the job!’” However I’ve not followed on that through yet…I’ve always wanted a tattoo, something to mark my experience.
FIRST OFFICIAL THE AMAZING SPIDERMAN 2 TRAILER
“Even in L.A., where everyone’s in yoga pants, I’ve never been the girl to run around in sweats. I love fashion and always have something put together, but I won’t wear anything specifically to be photographed in. I have become more cautious of making funny faces in public.”


Sat, 1 October 2022
“We have a God who loves, cares, and knows, and I can rest utterly in the hope that he will be with me, he will walk with me, and he will provide. He will care for every last moment of my day tomorrow as I am exhausted.”
Do you ever have nights where you can’t sleep? Whatever the reason may be, struggling to sleep is a form of suffering. Alasdair Groves explores what it looks like to lean on the Lord when we can’t sleep, assured that he is near and he cares.


The Aesthetics of Meaning:
Jewish Arts & Culture Aleph: On Ansky's The Dybbuk
by David Chack
So read the stage directions in the second act of The Dybbuk: Between Two Worlds by S. A. Ansky. In these directions we see encapsulated the world Ansky tries to present in the play, but more, we are given a visual matrix for a Jewish performance aesthetic. We must start our study of the formation of a Jewish performance aesthetic with the play and film The Dybbuk: Between Two Worlds by S. A. Ansky because of its influence as a play from which the standard was set for Jewish Theatre and Performance in years to come and was the accumulated repository for a history of Jewish culture in performance. This history, is represented by this play, the story of its author, and the story of its first productions. Further, as we analyze the play (and look at its film versions) we will see that within it is, not only a transmission of Jewish folklore but, the transmission of performance styles, motifs, and themes that will continually occur in the work of Jewish performers in film and theatre.
When The Dybbuk was first performed, much to the surprise of the Vilna Troupe, a Polish Jewish theatre company that Ansky was very close to, it was an incredible success. Their performance was a memorial to Ansky, who had died a month earlier. Though they had been close to him, the play had not been produced because it was deemed as a nice piece of folklore, but not good theatre. Yet the play not only spoke to its audiences in a deeper way than anticipated, the performances transcended the written word. All accounts of well-done performances of it, have nearly always given it the highest tributes. When it was performed by the Habimah Theatre from Russia in 1923 (becoming its signature piece to this very day) reviewers the world over saw it as a piece of theatre that defied description. Performed again in New York in 1933 by an American company, the Neighborhood Playhouse Theatre, in English, it was seen as, "one superb tragedy of pure mysticism" and "a resounding theatrical success." In that production, it gave the career of the actor who played Leah, who had only played musical comedy up until that point, a new direction. When the Polish film by Michael Wyzynski was released in 1937, it was seen by many, Jew and Gentile alike, as one of the finest films from Europe. The only purely negative review came from Frank Nugent of the New York Times, who saw it as a "documentary film of life among the pygmies or a trip to the Middle Ages". A reflection on that review will be done later.
Few plays written until this time focused on the Jewish life of the shtetlach, the small villages of East European Jewry. Most were melodramas like the ones by Avrom Goldfaden or other former cantors, turned theatre producer/directors. Some did center on Jewish Biblical themes, that could be seen as appropriating mythical themes in the existence of the Jewish people. Nahma Sandrow in her work, Vagabond Stars, the history of the Yiddish Theatre, sees The Dybbuk embodying both the history of the Yiddish Theatre and the artistic aspirations of the Yiddish Theatre which set the stage for Jewish performance for years to come. "It was with their production of The Dybbuk that they influenced other theaters, especially Yiddish theaters. And with it they set a direction for themselves." She continues later, "Herman's approach (the director for the Vilna Troupe) also had an affinity with the Neo-Romanticism that was a dominant Polish mode. It was also, in a way, a return to the Purim play." Sandrow points out that The Dybbuk was this embodiment of the past and future.
From this as well as from its acclaimed reception, we can see that its influence was considerable. What does it have that no other drama had before it and what does it have that makes it the quintessential Jewish play? By answering this core question we will extrapolate an emerging Jewish Performance Aesthetic, that can be broken down into its designated principles for future Jewish performers, whether they are aware of them or not. Clearly, the Vilna Troupe was unaware of them, because they did not even consider the play important enough to be performed in Ansky's lifetime. The surprise of the positive reception is at the very least, a tribute to Ansky's ability to tap into the sensibilities of the audiences of his time. This production and the production of the Moscow Jewish theatre company, Habimah, shows that the realization of the play does not occur on the written page, but through its performance. This play continues to be one of the most performed plays in the world and we will look at that as well by examining contemporary performances. And in this continuity of performance we will also see how a Jewish Performance Aesthetic emerges.
Historical and Biographical Context
Let us first understand S. A. Ansky and see his life as a context for the play. I am indebted to the work of David Roskies in his wonderful introduction to The Dybbuk and Other Writings by Ansky, and Roskies' seminal work Against the Apocalypse. Solomon Rappoport Ansky was born in 1863 in Vitebsk in the Lithuanian province of Russia, the same city of Marc Chagall. His original name was Shloyme-Zanvl ben Aharon HaCohen Rappoport. This town was both a center for the mystical, intellectual sect of Chasidism known as Chabad and had one of the finest yeshivot (Talmudic learning academies) in Lithuania.
A strong influence on young Rappoport's life was the economic fortune of his family. While growing up, he experienced both relative wealth and then poverty. His father lost his fortune and was forced to travel while his mother ran a tavern. They lived in the poorer section of town. His movement into secular Judaism and Russian socialism can be seen as having its roots here. The precociously intelligent Shloyme-Zanvl started to read militant works of the Hebrew Haskalah/Enlightenment such as Chattot Ne'urim (The Sins of Youth, 1876). This on top of Russian nihilism influenced him greatly. He also was enamored of the theatre and submitted scripts for review by the great Yiddish director, Jacob Adler, though Adler was not impressed. Eventually Shloyme-Zanvl lost his faith, became almost totally secular and was known as a "critical-realist". He ran a commune for poor boys on the outskirts of town who had left the yeshiva, taught them math and Russian and encouraged them to go on to "productive labor."
Eventually, Rappoport changed his name to Solomon Aronovich and then to Semyon Akimovich while immersing himself in the Russian revolutionary movement of the 1880's and 90's. Following the populist theoretician Peter Lavrov, he educated himself on the life of the peasants and then worked with and educated the miners of the Donets Basin. He lost most of his teeth to scurvy, maintained spartan surroundings, proteletarian dress, and according to Roskies, saw that the folk were an utterly distinct cultural and psychological group. He continued his writing and under the pen-name S. A. Ansky wrote Sketches on Folk Literature. It is not clear what the full meaning of his new name was to him. Possibly the "S. A." stood for Semyon or Solomon, Akimovich or Aronovich, but the Ansky was whimsical. One version is that it represented his mother who was named Anna, but another version was that it was coined for him by radical Russian writer Gleb Uspensky. As Roskies speculates, this name in its unclarity shows the two worlds of Ansky -- the Jew turned Russian radical and the revolutionary who could not give up his Jewish roots.
Ansky's inability to leave his Jewish roots came to a climax when friends of his in 1905 brought him to meet with Zionist youth groups and he reconsidered the writings of secular Jewish writers like I. L. Peretz who wrote about a Jewish nationalism with a modern European sensibility. Ansky, quickly, became part of a group of Jewish intellectuals to preserve the facts and culture of the Jewish folk in the shtetlach. He joined the Jewish History-Ethnographic Society, the Jewish Literary Society, became the literary editor of the Russian-Jewish monthly Evrieski Mir, and was close to the Jewish Folk Music Society based in St. Petersburg. In 1910 at a celebration of his twenty-fifth literary anniversary he said:
Twenty-five years ago when I first began writing, my striving was to work on behalf of the oppressed, the laboring masses, and it seemed to me then -- and that was my error -- that I would not find them among the Jews. I thought it was impossible to hold oneself aloof from politics and, again I did not find any political currents among Jews. Bearing within me an eternal yearning toward Jewry, I nevertheless turned in all directions and went to labor on behalf of another people. My life was broken, severed, ruptured. Many years of my life passed on this frontier on the border between both worlds. Therefore, I beg you, on this twenty-fifth year of summing up my literary work, to eliminate sixteen years.
Then in 1911 he headed and organized a trip that was to permanently change his life. This expedition was anthropological, to gather folklore by recording the songs and stories of the region with the Jewish History-Ethnographic Society from 1912-1914, particularly in the Ukraine, where Chassidism had originated. One might say that Ansky was on a personal search as well as a search for the survival of Jewish Culture. It was here that he found a new "Torah" for the masses. He collected:
1800 folktales and legends
500 cylinders of folk music
1000 songs and biblical Purim plays
1,000 melodies of songs and niggunim
100 historical documents
700 sacred objects
He wrote in 1914 in in the preface to The Jewish Ethnographic Program:
The Oral Tradition consisting of all manner of folklore -- stories, legends, parables, songs, witticisms, melodies, customs, and beliefs -- is, like the Bible, the product of the Jewish spirit; it reflects the same beauty and purity of the Jewish soul, the same modesty and nobility of the Jewish heart, the same loftiness and depth of Jewish thought.
As Ansky was collecting this material and as he was on his own personal search, and even as he was on a mission to save Jewish Culture, he was also engaged in something more. He was helping to quantify the elements for an aesthetic that is Jewish. The aesthetic which he identifies, he believes, is as old as the ancient texts of the Bible. As he said at a meeting of the Jewish Ethnographic Expedition on November 24, 1913, Chasidic tales and legends were the best possible means of acquainting non-Jews with the aesthetic and ethical dimensions of Jewish culture. Coupled with the immediate artistic considerations was Ansky's desire to save what was being lost through the destruction of the shtetlach.
With every old man who dies with every fire that breaks out, with every exile that occurs, we lose a piece of our past. The finest examples of our traditions are disappearing. In short our past sanctified by the blood and tears of so many innocent martyrs is vanishing and will soon be forgotten.
Even this need, to save the culture, was incorporated into the aesthetic. A survival myth, that can be seen as going back to the stories in the Hebrew Bible, is prominent in Ansky's thinking. This reaction to and response to martyrdom was very real for Ansky. He was aware of the pogroms and anti-Semitic actions of his time of which he knew first-hand. He, also, carried within him the memory of past catastrophes to the Jewish people. As Roskies writes in Against the Apocalypse and Yosef Yerushalmi in Zachor , the historic memory of these catastrophes was absorbed into an ongoing myth of Jewish response and survival to suffering and persecution, going back to the near-sacrifice of the Biblical Isaac by Abraham to the destruction of the two Temples. This survival myth has been elasticized to include the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, the massacres of Jews in the Crusades and the Middle Ages, the slaughter of Jews in Poland and Russia by Cossacks led by Chmielnicki in 1647-48 ( which is referred to inThe Dybbuk ), and other smaller pogroms, blood libels, and violence up until this day. The Holocaust is sometimes placed in this mythical paradigm, but more as an exception to the paradigm.
Clearly the way the myth is expressed is dependent on the particular group of Jews and their circumstances. Yet there was always a need to find a way to express it and remember. As Yerushalmi writes of Biblical narrative and its stress on memory, "(The Hebrew Bible's) injunctions to remember are unconditional, and even when not commanded, remembrance is pivotal. Altogether the verb zachar appears in its various declensions in the Bible no less than one hundred and sixty nine times, usually with either Israel or God as the subject, for memory is incumbent on both."
In finding a paradigmatic memory, which is myth, for a response to suffering and persecution the Jewish people often turned in their narratives to the myth of the Akedat Yitzchak or the binding of Isaac. This myth was used as a narrative to understanding suffering because, not only does Abraham have to go through a test, but Isaac as the offering, is defenseless. This is different than the sacrifice of Jesus as the central pradigm for the Christian religion because Jesus' crucifixion is meaningful in its removal of sin. Jesus died on the cross for the sins of the world. On the other hand, Isaac goes through the trauma of nearly being killed by his father for no reason that is apparent to him, except blind faith. Through this paradigm, as Shalom Spiegal writes about so eloquently in The Last Trial , the rabbis (in midrashic narratives) seek a meaning for suffering and persecution and find it in the blind faith of Isaac, who ironically goes blind later on in the Bible.
In the case of Jews being slaughtered during the Middle Ages by the Crusaders for not allowing themselves to be converted, the Jews themselves took the slaughters knife to mercifully kill their own children rather than face death at the Crusader's hands. And the story of Isaac is constantly evoked. One chronicler relates:
Has there ever been an akedah like this in all the generations since Adam? Did eleven hundred akedot take place on a single day, all of them comparable to the binding of Isaac son of Abraham? Yet for the one bound on Mount Moriah the world shook, as it is stated: "Behold the angels cried out and the skies darkened."The Dybbuk is an aesthetic response to survival, suffering, and persecution. When, as inThe Dybbuk , there is a need to understand the senseless deaths of innocent Jews by Chmielnicki and the Cossacks, the mythic narrative of the Akedat Yitzchak collapses into the generalized concept of dying al ha-Kiddush ha-Shem , for the sanctification of God's name. As it was described in the Scroll of Darkness by Shabbetai HaCohen Katz, an introduction to penitential prayers, in 1651:
And in the synagogue, before the Holy Ark, with slaughtering knives they slew the choirboys, the cantors, and the attendants. There the sons of our people brought up burnt offerings and sacrifices; they performed an Akedah on themselves as on rams and sheep and goats, and with fragrant smell rose to the dwelling place of angels. Then the enemy destroyed the synagogue, our surrogate Temple; they rampaged, they removed all the Torah scrolls, both old and new, and tore them to shreds, and cast them aside to be trampled upon by the feet of man and beast, horses and their riders, and they also made sandals and boots called posteles out of them and garments of several kinds and cast Scripture to the ground and trampled the parchment with their feet.
The need to make meaning out of catastrophe in Jewish narratives continues to the time of the writing of the play The Dybbuk. Pogroms, blood-libels, forced conscriptions of Jewish boys at the age of twelve into the army, and other forms of anti-Semitism continued in Eastern Europe and Russia. The list of pogroms in Russia boggles the imagination. Fourty-nine were killed in Kishinev during Passover of 1903; 800 were dead between 1905-06 in 726 pogroms; and in the Ukrainian civil war of 1918-19, between 60,000 and 250,000 Jews (according to different historians) were killed in pogroms.
Ansky's The Dybbuk
In this context we can better understand and view the performance narrative of The Dybbuk. When Ansky wrote the play, he had resumed his involvement with the Jewish people and artistically placed in the play his revolutionary inclinations, his pursuit for meaning in his own life as a Jew and a secular Russian, his vocation as a preserver and celebrator of Jewish folk and religious culture, and his fear for the destruction of East European Jewry. The Dybbuk is an expression of all of these aspects and one might say that the play's aesthetic is based on all these aspects. When Ansky wrote the play he claims to have met the characters the play is based on. Drawing from relity, Ansky constructs a narrative that deals with the Jewish experience as he saw it. Let us look at what Ansky constructed and see how Ansky made the choices he made, for performance.
The Dybbuk is a play presenting small town Jewish life (shtetlach) in Russia through the story of two young people who are in love, and are not allowed to wed, by Sender, the father of the bride (Leah) -- even though he had made a vow many years before that he would wed his first-born daughter to the first-born son of his closest friend, Nissen. He betrothes Leah to another man and Chonon, the son of Nissen, dies-- coming back, through mystical incantations, into the body of the Leah ( a dybbuk is a lost soul that cleaves to another soul ). After much suffering and introspection on the part of Sender, the soul of the young man is exorcised from her body and excommunicated. Chonon is then reinstated in the Jewish people and at the play's end Leah willingly gives up her life for him in an ecstatic moment. This joining, is seen in the context of the historic deaths (narrated in the play) of a bride and groom who were murdered by Cossacks as part of the Chmielnicki massacres against the Jews, in their town of Brinitz, on the wedding night in 1648. It is in this context the play explores themes that are taken up again and again in Jewish performance narratives; love, faith, theodocy, suffering, exile, anti-Semitism, and the confrontation with modernity. Let us analyze the play more closely to see how.
The play opens with a chant from afar that says:
Why, oh why did the soul plunge
From the upmost heights
To the lowest depths?
The seed of redemption
Is contained in the fall.
Then the curtain is raised to reveal the synagogue, in the mythical town of Brinitz. Idlers are sitting around studying or gossiping. The Messenger lies on the bench in the synagogue. Chonon stands meditatively.
Immediately, the tone is set and two characters of importance are both linked and introduced to the audience. First the tone. This is set throught the chanting, that immediately gives the play a sense of ritual and mystery. Then the words themselves, foreshadowing the plays events and outcome, provide the audience with tragic foreboding. But even more than this, stylistically, the words contextualize the play in a Jewish meta-historical sense. As mentioned earlier, the Jewish people place a great deal of emphasis on memory and placing it in a mythical paradigm. These words both evoke the destruction of the Temple (churban ) through the contrasting imagery of redemption, and the hope for the coming of the Messiah. And by mentioning the heights and dpeths to which a soul plunges, Ansky is not only foreshadowing the fall of Chonon in the play, but he is also evoking the hope of redeeming all the souls of Jews who died in persecutions and sufferings. Just as the liturgist in the Scroll of Darkness wrote about an akedah and churban , so are another about to take place in the long line of akedot and churbanot . And there will be deaths al ha kiddush hashem (for the sanctification of God's name). The irony of the play is that these deaths will come from an internalization of sufferings and persecutions. Yet it is in Ansky's this counter-response to sufferings and persecutions that Ansky is also responding and lamenting them.
In the two characters we see at the beginning of the play, we see the characters who most represent Ansky's voice. Chonon, as the highly principled, spiritual, ecstatic, mystic, who loves without bounds or cares for materialism-- is of course just like Ansky, the Russian revolutionary. The Messenger who personifies the richly woven tapestry of Jewish folklore and culture in the play is Ansky the preservationist. And both are Ansky, the young Talmudic scholar, who provides a new textual reading, through this folklore, inmidrashic fashion , to the action of the play. This, then shows Ansky as a creator of a performance narrative which weaves into it, a particularistic Jewish aesthetic.
As the scene moves along we learn that Chonon is a very mystical student and that he hopes to marry Leah the daughter of Sender, through the incantations and meditation on mystical texts. He is also participating in physical self-abnegation by fasting, depriving himself of sleep, and going to the ritual baths late at night. His soul is one that yearns to reach the heighest heights, as he says:
Kabbalah tears the soul from its earthly bounds! It lifts man to the highest spheres and opens up the heavens so that he can see inside. It leads straight to Paradise, it draws you to the Infinite, it opens a corner of the great curtain. (Falls) My strength... is failing.
Not long after this we meet Leah, the woman he loves that he hasn't directly asked to love him. Yet they are inexplicably drawn to each other. She comes to the synagogue to help fix a curtain for the ark and Chonon stares at her. Then as she is about to go she asks to kiss the Torah. She is granted permission and comes closer to Chonon as she gets closer to the scroll. She kisses it with passion and then they leave. Chonon then sings verses from the Song of Songs , which is seen by the rabbis as a book of love poetry and which is also, mystically, about God's desire for Israel. But Chonon's ecstasy does not last long. Reb Sender arrives to celebrate the betrothal of his daughter Leah to a young man in another town. Chonon, at first in deep despair over how his mystical incantations failed, suddenly reaches higher heights than he has ever reached and declares that he sees the two-fold name of God and perishes. The scene ends as the celebrators of Reb Senders' discover Chonon's body and the Messenger says, "He has been damaged-- beyond repair."
Two other things to note in this first scene. The first is that Chonon knows that what he is doing is not condoned by normative Judaism and that he is verging on great sin. This can be seen in the play's text, as follows:
Chonon: We need not wage war against sin, we need only to purify it. Just as a goldsmith refines gold in a flame or a farmer threshes the chaff from the wheat, so must we cleanse sin of its dross until nothing but holiness remains."
Henech: Holiness in sin? Where did you get such an idea?"
Chonon: Everything in God's creation contains a spark of holiness.
Henech: God did not create sin; that was the work of Satan!
Chonon: And who created Satan? It was God. Satan is the opposite of God, and as one of His aspects, he contains a holy spark.
This exchange could have been inspired by an occurence in Ansky's life when he was a witness to a desecrated synagogue. The fragments of the Ten Commandments from the building, lay on the ground and all that remained was Thou Shalt Kill and Thou Shalt Commit Adultery. For Ansky, because the rest of the commandments were missing, their strength was diminished. Just as Ansky saw the loss of Jewish Law, in the wake of catastrophe and called for the need of a new Jewish culture, Chonon sees the need to enter into the realm of sin to redeem love in the face of desecration.
This is amplified in another part of the scene between the Messenger and Sender, after Sender returns from getting his daughter betrothed. The Messenger tells Sender a parable. "Once a rich but stingy Chasid visited the rebbe. Taking him by the hand, the rebbe led him to the window and asked him to describe what he saw through the pane. "I see people in the street," the Chasid said. Then the rebbe took his hand again and led him to a mirror. "Now what do you see?" he asked. "I see myself," the Chasid answered. "Do you understand? Both the window and the mirror are made of glass; but as soon as you cover the glass with a small amount of silver you no longer see others but only yourself." Clearly, Ansky's socialist background is part of the context for this message. But as mentioned earlier, the Messenger not only represents Ansky, but he presents the midrashic discourse that is intertextual to the action. That being the case this parable is meant to relay a sacred value to counter, what Ansky believes is, the profane value of capitalism. Through this particularistic Jewish aesthetic, the action is furthered and so is Ansky's perception of sacred Jewish values.
Act II opens with the focus on the gravesite of the young man and woman who were murdered by the Cossaks in 1648. This is the only date mentioned in the play and so anchors the play, meta-historically, but leaves the "real" time of the play loose and unfixed. By doing this, Ansky amplifies the context of memory and suffering. The perception is given that for time immemorial there is still that connection, and this creates an even stronger contrast to the desecration of Jewish values by Sender. Everything is placed within this myth of loss, exile, suffering and catastrophe--even love. As the story of the couple is told in the play:
When that enemy of the Jews, Chmielnicki, may his name be blotted out, came to our town with his Cossaks and slaughtered half the Jews, he killed the bride and the groom just as they were being led to the wedding canopy. They were buried in one grave on the very spot on which they were murdered, and their grave has been called "the holy grave" ever since. (In a whisper ) Each time the rabbi performs a wedding ceremony he hears sighs coming from the grave. In order to bring comfort and cheer to the buried bride and groom, it has long been a custom in our town to dance around the grave after every wedding."
From this point on, the preparation for the wedding commences. Leah must first dance with the poor, which is done in a stylized and macabre fashion. In many productions, though it is not specified in the play, a character depicting death also dances with Leah. She then prepares to go to the cemetery to bring back any souls that she would like to have at her wedding. At this point she remembers Chonon. It is a poignant memory of passion and longing.
Once there was a young man with a lofty soul and a profound intelligence-- a long life lay before him. And then in an instant, his life was cut down; strangers came to bury him on foreign soil. (Sorrowfully) What happened to his unlived life, his unspoken words, his unuttered prayers? Grandma, when the flame of a candle is snuffed out, you can relight it and it burns to the end. So how can the uncompleted life of a person be stamped out forever? How can it?
Then she looks at the grave of the bride and groom.
I have known this holy grave of the bride and groom who are buried here since I was a child. Awake and asleep I have often felt them with me; they are as close to me as my own flesh and blood. (Thoughtfully) A young and handsome couple on their way to the bridal canopy, looking forward to a long and beautiful life together, and in a flash all was over-- evil people with axes hacked the bride and groom to death. They were buried in one grave so that they would be together for all eternity. And at every wedding as we dance around their grave, they join in the festivities. Beloved bride and groom I invite you to my wedding! Come and stand beside me under the canopy!
Leah makes the linkage between the death of Chonon and the deaths of the bride and groom. And this is what many in the original audiences would do as well. Remembering all too clearly the deaths of those who suffered the consequences of catastrophe, as Leah mourns for Chonon, she is also mourning for all Jews whose lives were cut short and who had so much to give. Once again this points up Ansky's purpose in creating a performance narrative that both shows the results of anti-Semitism leading to an internalization of suffering and that taints the lives of the Jewish people in Eastern Europe.
This makes perfect sense in light of what is to come. Leah returns from the graveyard, inviting her mother and Chonon to her wedding. Then when the groom comes forward to veil Leah, she pushes him away and says:
You are not my bridegroom! (She runs to the grave and throws herself on it ) Holy bride and groom, protect me! Save me!
( She falls; people run to her and lift her up; she looks wild-eyed and cries out, not with her own voice but with that of a man )
Ah! Ah! You have buried me! But I have returned to my promised bride and will not leave her!
(Nachman goes to Leah; she shouts at him) Murderer!
Nachman: She is mad!
The Messenger: A dybbuk has entered the body of the bride.
At this point, when the dybbuk of Chonon enters into Leah, it comes after a progression of things and builds the suspense about the death of Chonon in light of his mysticism. She dances with the poor and the beggars, which also culminates in her dance with death. She goes to the dead in the cemetary, of which many had been killed in pogroms and invites her mother's soul to the wedding. This was a common practice in villages in Eastern Europe.
At Chonon's grave, which had been revealed to her in a dream when he came to her, something unspeakable occurs, according to Frayde the nurse. So when she returns to the wedding party, the dybbuk's enterance into her, is the result of a ritualistic journey into personal memory and collective memory. The dybbuk joins her, not only for what had been done to Chonon, but also for the loss of all Jewish souls who are in exile and who gave their lives al ha-kiddush ha-shem . As mentioned previously, Ansky wrote, "With every old man who dies with every fire that breaks out, with every exile that occurs, we lose a piece of our past. The finest examples of our traditions are disappearing. In short our past sanctified by the blood and tears of so many innocent martyrs is vanishing and will soon be forgotten." On some level, the dybbuk is the result of Akedat Yitzchak , except instead of the binding of Isaac it is the sacrifice of Isaac that has come back to his father Abraham and wants to bear witness to the suffering of the world. When the Messenger sees the dead Chonon on the floor in Scene One, he says, "He has been damaged-- beyond repair." This damage points to the mystical concept that the world is broken, fragmented by the evil that it faces and the suffering that exists. This is not unusual in modern, pre-Holocaust era literature. One might even see thedybbuk similarly to the character of the madman in the Russian Jewish novelThe Mare by S. Y. Abramovitsh who pointed to the maddening effect the world was having on the Jews at this time, resulting in misery afflicted by Jews on each other. In the creature of the dybbuk we may even see foreshadowings of post-Holocaust literature, in the character of the madman who, in the tales of Elie Wiesel, Aharon Appelfeld, or I. B. Singer, comes back from a place of suffering, to bear witness, and yet is not believed. The dybbuk returns to attest to the need for wholeness in body and spirit, in the individual and in the collective.
As we move on to Act III, we are in Miropol, the home of Reb Azriel, a Chasidic rebbe. We see the small shtiebl or place to pray in Reb Azriel's home. The scene begins with a story by Rebbe Nachman of Bratslav, the great grandson of the founder of Chasidism. The story is being told by the Messenger. In this intertextual moment, the story is told of a mountain with the heart of the world that longs to join the clear stream, at another mountain, to quench its thirst. But paradoxically, if it moves towards the stream, it loses sight of the stream and if it loses sight of the stream it dies. So it exists from day to day, longing for the stream and not beign able to draw closer. Yet a just man, a tzaddik ( an attribute given to Chasidic masters ) gathers the songs of the heart and the stream and gathers the shining threads that come from their singing and weaves them into time. and whne he weaves a full day he gives it to the heart of the world, and the heart of the world gives it to the clear stream and all live another full day. Once again, the scene is set by a text. In this case, a text that amplifies the tenuous nature of the existence of the world.
And then Reb Azriel, the tzaddik , comes in and tells the story of the holiest day of the year, Yom Kippur, the day of judgement, where the High Priest alone enters the Holy of Holies, and then says the single name of God in order to save the world. Reb Azriel goes on to say that every day is Yom Kippur in a person's life. Therefore every sin and every wrong committed by a man brings the world closer to destruction. Then Reb Azriel paraphrases the chant, heard at the beginning of the play, that after a soul has soared to the highest height, sometimes it falls to the lowest depths. Then a world is destroyed, and all the emanations of God mourn the loss.
When this collage of telling Chasidic and Jewish tales is over Reb Sender comes with Leah and the nurse. Reb Azriel remembers Reb Sender as a former student of his. He has misgivings about his own strength in dealing with the dybbuk in Sender's daughter, he calls Sender in to listen to him. After hearing Sender's story and wondering if Sender did anything wrong, he calls ten men in to be the minyan (quorum) for the service of exorcism. When Reb Azriel speaks to the Rabbi in the town, he discovers that Sender is holding something back from his story. Rabbi Shimshon related to Reb Azriel that a dead former student, Reb Nissen, appeared to him in dream and demanded that a rabbinical court be summoned to try Reb Sender. Just as on Yom Kippur, as was alluded to at the beginning of the scene, a tribunal is called to account for the sins of Reb Sender.
Scene IV begins with the preparation for the court. Reb Azriel summons Reb Nissen from the grave and when it is determined that he is present the court begins. Rabbi Shimshon, speaking for Reb Nissen, says that Reb Sender was supposed to marry his daughter to the son of Nissen. And when the son of Nissen reached the town of Brinitz and even lived with Reb Sender and fell in love with his daughter, Reb Sender turned him out becuase the son was poor and Reb Sender was rich and he wanted a rich person for his daughter Leah. His son's soul is now in the body of Leah and caught between two worlds. Sender replies, by apologizing and saying he knew his friend had died and that he didn't know that a son had been born. And then with the passage of time he had forgotten his vow to his friend. The court in the name of Reb Azriel decreed that though Reb Sender had broken his vow and had been jaded by his own wealth, he still is not totally responsible because a vow cannot be made over something not yet created, like a child. Nevertheless, Reb Sender must sayKaddish over Nissen for his entire life. So, it is the decree that due to Reb Sender's forgetting he must remember Nissen for the rest of his life. Yet Nissen left the court dissatisfied.
Then Reb Azriel assmbles the court to exorcise the dybbuk from Leah. After commanding the dybbuk to leave, to no avail, Reb Azriel has seven ram's horns blown to excommunicate Chonon's soul. This is seen as the worst possible punishment. This horn, called a shofar, is blown signifying the end of Yom Kippur, that the gates of heaven are closed and the heavenly tribunal is over. With these overtones of heavenly judgement, Reb Azriel has the shofar blown three times, with appropriate commands for the dybbuk to leave. Finally the dybbuk is excommunicated after the third blast, and leaves Leah's body. Almost immediately afterwords, Reb Azriel revokes the excommunication on Chonon's soul crying out for mercy on Chonon's soul. All of those present, led by Sender, say the Kaddish for him, and they leave quickly to assemble the wedding.
While they are out Leah is taken care of by Frayde, her nurse. As the nurse sings her a lullabye, the she falls asleep. Leah immediately notices someone sighing. It is the soul of Chonon. They speak of each other, almost as though they gradually need to gain memory of each other. They speak of their undying love for each other. She says:
I will bear you in death, in my heart. And in our dreams at night we will both rock our unborn little babies to sleep. We will sew little shirts for them to wear and sing them lullabies.
"Hush, hush little ones without cradle,
without clothes dead you are and still unborn
timeless and forever lost...."
Chonon: I have departed from your body. I am coming to your soul. (He appears against the wall in white. )
Leah: (Happy ) The circle is broken. I see you, my bridegroom. Come to me!
Chonon: Come to me!
Leah: I am coming to you.
Chonon: I am coming to you.
Voices: (Offstage ) Lead the bride to the wedding canopy!
Leah: I am enveloped in a blaze of light. My bridegroom, my destined one, I am united with you for all eternity. Together we will soar higher and higher, ever higher. (Stage darkens )
Reb Azriel: (Head bowed ) We are too late.
The Messenger: Blessed is the true Judge. (Total darkness )
Why, oh why did the soul plunge
From the upmost heights
To the lowest depths?
The seed of redemption is in the fall.
As Ansky ends the play he leaves us with the love that Leah and Chonon have for each other. But there is disquietude in the ending. This is due to Ansky's ability to write a dramatic conclusion that presents an unfinished matter. The dialectic exists between the suffering of the Jews, the need to be true to themselves as Jews, and the need to examine the old religious ways in light of modernity. It is unfinished because Ansky doesn't come up with any answers. He is as perplexed as we are. But he is also in awe and trembling of the tremendous Jewish culture of East European Jewry, the impending doom for East European Jews, the fossilization of the culture that seeks answers in capitalism, and the search for his own Jewish identity which is also between two worlds. The Dybbuk is his response and counter-response to suffering and persecution. It tries to understand suffering that turns against itself and on those who are themselves suffering. Perhaps, the cruelest torment of all, is to endure suffering from the ones who themselves are suffering.
Ansky wrote The Dybbuk to be performed. Unfortunately, he never saw it performed. He tried to get the Polish Vilna Theatre Troupe to do it but they kept putting him off, though they personally admired him.
Copyright 2004 by David Chack. All rights reserved.
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Choua & Daniel | Spring Romance | Oshkosh, WI
We had to postponed Choua and Daniel's engagement session several times due to the ever changing weather. It was that awkward time between winter and spring where you never know if it's going to be dress weather or a winter jacket. Even on the day it finally happened, it had rained so hard the entire day. Somehow, we managed to find this magic timeframe where it stopped raining and we were able to capture beautiful photos. We even managed to finish right before it started raining again.
I love capturing love stories. Choua and Daniel have been together for almost a decade now. I've seen them go through so many things that both challenged and strengthened their relationship. I'm so happy that they're finally getting married because they both deserved total happiness together! They understand each other and always know how to make the other person laugh. They are two halves to one whole. I can't wait for them to tie the knot.