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On Leaving and Holding

One aspect of Joachim Trier’s 2026, Academy Award-nominated film, Sentimental Value, lingers: the idea that a house can hold memory, and in doing so, remind people of who they are and who they have been. The family home in the film becomes a kind of unconscious structure, a repository for grief, history, and the versions of themselves they could not keep.

I have never had that kind of house.

I have moved every two to four years for as long as I can remember. My life can be mapped through new cupboards and unfamiliar ceilings. I learned early how to fold myself into spaces never meant to hold me for long. Even now, some part of me is already preparing an exit.

WHY MAKE MIRROR ART IN WAR-TORN TEHRAN?

Why does Aref Montazeri, an Iranian sculptor whose art sells for over a million dollars, continue to make his towering works from shards of mirror glass in his studio in Tehran, amid window-shattering bomb blasts? He gently wraps his creations in shock-absorbing material, but why continue with such a fragile medium? In a Wall Street Journal article by Kelly Crow (May 2-3, 2026), he says, “Nothing, not even war, should prevent us from pursuing what we aim for.”

Shortcut

I live in the city and often walk to my preferred destinations. Sometimes my walks include shortcuts when going to familiar places. One common shortcut was an alley which contained rats.

While the rats were disturbing and seemingly everywhere, I continued using my shortcut. At some point an intervention occurred – poison. I began to experience the mixed blessing of dying rats instead of living rats. While I hesitated to look at the dead and decaying rats, they were in my path and I couldn’t ignore them. In time, the living rats disappeared. But at the end of my alley shortcut, “my inner rats” remained alive in the office of my psychoanalyst.

“Pagan” or Sublime?

When the curtain rises on Brian Friel’s renowned play, “Dancing at Lughnasa,” Michael, a pleasant young man, addresses the audience as though he’s lying on an analyst’s couch: “When I cast my mind back to that summer of 1936, different kinds of memories offer themselves to me.” He was only seven, but the memories still make him “uneasy;” it was a time of “things changing too quickly.” These memories unfold for us on the stage.

Closings

At a funeral, I read Tennyson’s poem, “Crossing the Bar,” written when he was 80. He requested this poem be printed at the end of future publications of his work. He was closing his life’s work knowing he soon would be “crossing the bar.”

Seeing Red

Many countries that have colonized indigenous populations have issued subsequent apologies for earlier atrocities. Since 1999, Denmark has issued three apologies to Greenland, the most recent in 2025, when, in an emotional speech, Prime Minister, Mette Frederiksen apologized to the Inuit population for the 1960s forced contraception of thousands of indigenous girls, many as young as 12, denying them the right to decide to have children or not.

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