DOUBLE DOWN
I’ve been thinking a lot about vocation. Or whatever we call what, at some point, seems to take deep root between our gut and our heart. That thing pecking at us from the inside as the thing we must do in this life. Whether we listen to it or not, it’s always there. There’s been books written about us ignoring it and as many books about us pursuing it. Trying to help others figure out how to follow this instinct is a bit of a preoccupation for some creatives. They’re there to tell us something about listening.
My mom was pretty clear about her vocation. In 2010, when I was helping her set up a Twitter account, I asked, what should we put in your bio? ‘Mmm, escribe: Si volviera a nacer, volvería a ser periodista.’ If I was born again, I’d be a journalist again. Her tone was sweet even when she spoke with the utmost conviction. It wasn’t the first time I had heard her say that. By that point, I had a communications degree and we’d often discuss what it meant to be a journalist. She liked how the profession gave her the most flexibility to explore the truth. During her time at Universidad Central de Venezuela, she had wanted to study Filosofia & Letras and that inclination was deeply ingrained in her approach. She once said ‘many great writers have been journalists too. Look at García Marquez.’ She’d assure me that usually you couldn’t escape one without the other: to be a good journalist you have to know how to tell a good story.
Last Sunday, after a perfect spring one spent at Prospect Park, my friends and I decided to watch ‘Civil War,’ the latest by British writer/director Alex Garland. The night before, we’d been looking at our phones non-stop as we headed to dinner at Yemen Café because Iran bombed Israel after Israel bombed their consulate in Damascus. Suddenly, doom felt inches closer. Doom that’s already been attempting to erase Palestine. These days the atmosphere is just heavy for everyone daring to look — even those actively staying away from the news deal with a lot to keep up the facade.
Watching a movie like this was probably not the best idea. It highlights four photographers and journalists on assignment deep in the trenches of a collapsing United States. But I caved after making a rule for myself: I’d walk out if anxiety or tears showed up. At some point, Lee Smith — the character played with great aplomb by Kristen Dunst — is decompressing in a bathtub and has a flashback of a Black man set ablaze. I turned to my friend and warned him if things got to me I’d see him later. Thankfully, that was the only moment when I considered leaving the theater. This thing is not an easy watch for a lot of reasons. One being the inescapable thought that we have the luxury to see it as ‘entertainment.’ We get to pay to contemplate what’s happening as fiction when other people are somewhere else sleeping in tents, without food, water, and electricity, and with the incessant buzz of drones as their soundtrack because they’re actually living through a genocide. It’s problematic, this business of living ‘normally.’
Fascism, journalism, racism, community, denial, hope, ambition, trauma. . . the film touches it all. It’s packed with the subtle and the not so much. But as much as it is about war, it also explores vocation and what it means to be committed to what you’re called to do. It’s also about mentoring someone you know will encounter the same or worse horrors as you because the same calling is pecking at them. Sadly, you may be a hero to someone with the same wish you once had. The one before you saw deep into its real consequences. You share a vocation with an inherent death wish.
And the kind of vocation this film shows well is a privileged one. Lee, Jessie (Cailee Spaeny), Joel (Wagner Moura), and Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson) are nothing like Bisan Owda, Motaz Azaiza, Hind Khoudary, Plestia Alaqad and many others who’ve had no choice but to document the horrors happening to their people. We can assume the characters chose this as their career when America was healthier. Their press vehicle and vest still affords them some protection — unlike the fate of over 100 journalists recently murdered in Gaza. What drives these people may be the only similarity: a need to tell the truth in hopes it’ll create change. During a break in their road trip from New York City to Washington, D.C., a disheartened Lee tells her older colleague, Sammy: ‘I thought every time I was taking pictures somewhere else I was sending a warning home not to do this.’ It’s been futile.
Still, we get a sense that no matter how much one tries to get in the way of our vocation or warn a newcomer about its burdens, we know too well that once we’re committed to it we won’t be able to quit. Not even for our loved ones. There are a few moments when Lee and Jessie discuss where their families are in the middle of this mess: ‘in a farm, pretending this isn’t happening.’ We even make a pit stop in a town where a shop attendant is doing a nice job at pretending. So many of us do that, don’t we? Here I was, watching a film after spending a blissful day in the sun. And, the night before, when we were sipping sweet Yemeni tea, I noticed the server watching the same bomb-filled clips my friends and I had seen. The ones going off over there. Right before, he had kindly brought us the tender lamb over rice, and the bread, and the fish, and the beans that we all ate in silence.
These past few weeks have been strange. There was a minor earthquake that shook our walls. An eclipse that made the shadows all weird. A dear friend’s birthday celebration. Days after, my body felt like stone. I was physically spent. One night after coming home, I crawled onto the couch in a daze, unable to sleep until 5 a.m. On Friday when the workday was over, I took a hot shower and suddenly, a poem! The first few words came up mid-lather: peck, peck, peck. It pecked enough for me to dry off and type the first shitty version. The inner ruckus it caused gave me the feeling one must double down on whatever calls to us at times like these. There is an urgency for a reason.
Often, I find this urgency to be reawakened by an awareness of death. Death is always here, it's just that sometimes we decide not to pay attention to the fragility of life because it’s an impossible task to live with that kind of appreciation. We’re constantly pulled out of reality in the hassle of our daily existence until an event takes us a bit closer. We lose a parent, a friend, something dear, and there we are. Right now we seem to be losing our most kind human values — and we either give into that or choose to center an alternative. In a recent interview in Centre Stage, the Israeli author Ilan Pappé said:
There’s a moment you get up and you say. . . you’re at peace with yourself. You’re OK with what you think. You’re willing to pay the price. You’re not looking back because you know too much, and from then on, you become committed to the cause, to continue what you believe in.
I think of this because in the film, rookie photographer Jessie goes through her first major traumatic event and sits alone to process it all. When Lee approaches her, she confesses, ‘I've never been scared like that before, and I've never felt more alive’ That’s some real grief clarity. Sometimes it gifts you a strange strength and drive — as if it was the only way through. Right then, you could tell Lee accepted there was no talking this one out of her photojournalistic pursuit. If telling the truth is a service that requires a total awareness of being, a vocation guided by service seems to overlap with our own need to come into who we are. The film does an incredible job showing us that you won’t be able to skip the pain involved in the kind of realizations and experiences that put us on the path to conscious action. And for war journalists, the path that turns you into a sort of sieve, permeable enough to let everything through, and strong enough to endure what you’ll witness and report.
Choosing a thorny vocational path means we may have to sacrifice our well-being. Garland makes choices that indirectly show our coping mechanisms aren’t always copacetic: a cigarette here, a joint puff there, sips straight from the bottle, sleeping pills, and then, the inevitable panic. A big, big breathless beast that swallows you at an inconvenient moment. He shows us this kind of life is an impossible thing to go through alone, and you’ll need some like-minded comrades. Sometimes they’ll need to hold you by the scruff of the neck for you can take a single step. They know you well enough to know the pecking will hopefully shock you awake again. That eventually, you'll stand upright and take your damn place. Sometimes that might be behind a camera, and other times it might be right before a bullet so you can become the shield for someone else to come fully into being. So others can sit comfortably at a farm a bit longer pretending this isn’t happening.
