Commencement Speech May 2022
Congratulations to the graduates of 2022
You have completed your undergraduate studies, one of the essential phases in your LIFE of learning. You did it despite very turbulent times, amidst the global COVID pandemic and the resulting isolation, the turmoil of racial injustice, the threat of climate change, and during your very last term—as though this weren’t enough—a devastating war in Ukraine. These are just some of the shokes, collective and individual, that you’ve faced. But you persisted, showed up, and did the work—and now you are here, exhaling deeply. We are so proud of you!
As a Russian citizen living in relative safety in the US, it is very easy for me to say what I am going to say next because I will not be arrested or face harassment or censure: I deeply, viscerally, with all my heart condemn the violence, initiated by Russia, with its war of aggression and nuclear threat. Until February of 2022, Russian citizens inside their country were able to speak up against certain actions of the state. But on the 24th of February this year, things changed in one night: all independent media sources were shut down, people who spoke against the invasion of Ukraine were banned or arrested and continue to be arrested for things like holding up a poster saying, “Don’t kill,” or even worse, simply holding up a blank page of paper.
Consequently, Russians only have access to the narrative presented by the state, devoid of critical context and biased in favor of state power. Over a million people have left the country, so far, out of fear of persecution and economic catastrophe. In one day, Russia’s future changed irreversibly. You can argue that it was happening gradually, yet nobody could predict that the last turn would happen so quickly.
In the light of these events I would like to start with an excerpt of the speech that (former editor of a russian student magazine DOXA), Alla Gutnikova gave in court after being sentenced to two years of “corrective labor” for speaking up. Alla is your age.
She writes, “I often feel like a fish, a bird, a schoolboy, a baby. But recently I was surprised to learn that Joseph Brodsky, (a Russian poet, Nobel prize in LIT), was also judged at 23. And since I was also assigned to human kind, I will say this:
I believe that the world was created for tenderness, hope, pleasure, solidarity, passion and joy.
But instead, we are surrounded by an unbearable amount of violence. And I don't want violence. In any form. If I decided to list all the violence that is around, no day, week, year would be enough. To see the violence, all you have to do is open your eyes. My eyes are open.
Alla continues: “These days neither I nor my friends can find a place to escape from horror and pain.
Someone I know is scared. They choose to remain silent.
But Audre Lorde says: Your silence will not protect you.
Remember fear eats the soul
The Moscow metro says: Passengers are forbidden to be on a train that goes to a dead end.
And the St. Petersburg band "Aquarium" adds: This train is on fire.
Alla quotes: Lao Tzu through Tarkovsky said: The main thing is for them to believe in themselves and become helpless as children. Because weakness is great and strength is insignificant. When a person is born, he is weak and flexible, and when he dies, he is strong and tough. When a tree is growing, it is tender and pliant, but when it is dry and hard, it dies. Hardness and strength are death’s companions. Pliancy and weakness are expressions of the freshness of being, because what has hardened will never win.
Remember / fear / eats / the soul.
Alla concludes: Be like a child. Do not be afraid to ask (yourself and others) what is good and what is bad. Don't be afraid to say the king is naked. Don't be afraid to shout, to cry. Repeat (to yourself & others): 2 + 2 = 4. I am human, I am strong and brave. Strong and brave ... Strong and courageous.
Freedom is a process by which you develop the habit of being unavailable to slavery.
That is Alla Gutnikova and she is serving her sentence as we speak.
She is your age.
__________________
Since I am also assigned to the human race, I would like to add:
Though I was born in Moscow, my last name is Ukrainian, my father is half Ukrainian, and part of my extended family is still in Ukraine.
I just spoke to them in January. I was brought up singing Ukrainian love songs driving across Russia with my Dad. The ties run deep: blood and cultural connections exist in every second family across the borders of Russia and Ukraine. Yet now we see members of the same family filled with rage, trusting the state propaganda more than their own relatives.
So in the months since this absurd war began, I couldn't stop thinking about how readily available our bodies are to state propaganda. What is that blinding power that makes one family member hate another? What tool is used to dehumanize whomever the president and his friends in corporate media may choose to target? I witnessed firsthand the strength of the propaganda that incites hate, that most powerful of weapons.
Like Alla, I see us facing a world that is driven by a cult of violence. The false accusations that put people in prisons yet again speak not only of a lack of critical thinking and misinformation, but of ideas invented to spread mistrust and fear. This cultivated fear, which we might also call propaganda, is intended to legitimize hate as a form of political expression. We witness that emotions are becoming more than just a private matter. Hate becomes the only remaining instrument, all other sentiments are overridden.
Sometimes hate even masquerades as love, that love of nation that binds people together against perceived threats and those fantastical “others” who supposedly endanger jobs, security, wealth, land, and natural resources.
But even more important is how the cultivation of hate reduces complexity, the multiple, the diversity of perspectives, the whole picture of reality with its paradoxes and simultaneity.
The questions that I now have are :
“How do emotions of hate move within and between bodies?” and “How do individual emotions move the collective body?”
As hate, love, care slides sideways and backwards between bodies, it reopens past associations. As it ripples and vibrates in the gut I think about the role of the BODY in the choices we make.
And that is where I think about the unique kind of learning that you've known here at Bennington, the learning through doing, experiencing, sensing, making, and applying. This experiential, embodied learning encourages you to venture into the unknown with your whole sentient body, to take risks, to make connections, to think abstractly, to work together (body to body).
Opening yourself to think with all your senses in order to embrace the full multi-dimensionality of the embodied experience is key: the body that is aware and noticing, eyes open, is the body that makes a choice to resist hate and servitude, instead practicing daily to cultivate the capacity for pleasure and care.
Our bodies are designed to learn.
While often unacknowledged, the body is an obvious and critical tool in the development of learning, in paying attention, in choosing how to move and because of this, how to think. We can see where attention is focussed based on bodily shifts. Movement and touch is the foundation underneath all the sensing that we do as we gather data around us.
When I think of the body, I think of its sentience: that collection of cells that aggregates into tissues, tissues into organs, organs into systems, systems into the body that moves, interprets, synthesizes, translates, responds, witnesses, and absorbs. I think of it as the bodymind, a consciousness, a whole, undivided flow of exchange. The embodied practices at the center of your education aim to develop this bodymind and strengthen the link between corporeality, feeling, and action as manifested through falling, rolling, rubbing, and resisting with back, belly, bottom, neck, jaw, and face.
Through the body, we pay attention to what is inside of us, what is in front of us and who is around us, in all their differences and humanity. Through the movement of the body we deliver our actions, by which we can heighten our awareness to the choices we make.
Unfortunately we often don’t notice this awareness/feedback mechanism till we are already in pain.
But most importantly, the BODY can hold all paradoxes at once. When you see a body in action, you see simultaneity of gender, racial and neural diversity, renewal and aging, vulnerability and boldness, fragility and flexibility, myriad of cultural inputs and influences, action and ability to wait. You move into the world with this visceral understanding of the non-binary, multi-dimensional experience of living—living in the flesh, in a way that holds complexity at the center.
Through a body we know more than we can put into words.
This commitment not to simplify and reduce is grounded in the PLEASURE of sensing our somatic livelihood and existence with all its colors and dimensions in order to penetrate the fog of misinformation and hysteria.
Each term at Bennington you were choosing what classes to take, what interests to follow and what questions to ask, connecting and synthesizing information. You were listening to your internal knowing, that resides within you and the satisfaction that it brings. That satisfaction is a sensation.
Making choices is the turbulent sea that you have been swimming in for the last few years. Learning through this complex design of inflow and outflow of information is how we grow awareness to prevent automatic movement and thought, unconscious patterns and beliefs.
Choosing what to pay attention to in this sea of movement and information is the practice of creating change.
_________________
At all your plan meetings, we asked you : what is it that you really want to do? You were encouraged to study broadly to be exposed to the fields that might point you to the direction of your calling….. like accidentally entering a DANCE class……
We were asking you to listen to the responses of your whole system— What do you get excited by? What moves you?—to pay attention to where your desires lie and where you find your pleasure. And that pleasure is a sensation as well.
Audre Lord said: “When pleasure is present, it is not only about what we do, it is about how acutely and fully we can be in the doing. Once we grow the capacity to experience satisfaction and completion, we can then get closer to the fullness of living”. The aim here is to make our lives empowered by the deepest knowledge that resides in the BODY.
IN order to hear the internal call, the call of what YOU want to do in your work and life, you had to question norms and constructs that shaped you. You had to undo former beliefs and rules, sometimes even previous training. You had to uncensor the body from societal forms in order to hear its response.
Your learning means you are more than ready to continue to take pleasure from what you do and to keep working on freeing your body from what you don’t need anymore.
Because you hold multiple selves at once you can embrace the world with all its paradoxes, complexities and simultaneity,
More importantly, you are learning to take full, unrestricted pleasure, because being connected to your internal knowing is to have agency in choosing how to live your life.
You know how to do it.
And finally, here are the words of one of your classmates/my student:
"One has to be willing and aware; any other state of being sounds to me like not participating in your own life course, not being. Right now is the time to do what you want, to ask for what you need, to LOVE how you must, because tomorrow is never, ever promised."
BENNINGTON COLLEGE HAS ENGAGED YOU IN EDUCATION THAT Is ETHICAL and INTELLECTUAL, BUT ALSO AESTHETIC AND SENSUAL. NOW WE ASK YOU TO TAKE THAT EMBODIED KNOWLEDGE INTO THE WORLD, AND TO MEET YOUR CHALLENGES WITH FEARLESSNESS AND PLEASURE.
Thank you.