“Yesterday, I went to a wedding. The bride, Anastasia, wore a white dress and a veil tucked under a crown of flowers, paired with a leather jacket and knee-high combat boots. The groom, Anton, wore black Levi’s and black boots. The couple posed atop the ruins of our hometown, Kharkiv, which has been under near constant bombardment. They kissed and danced to music playing from a nearby car stereo, in an empty street that would normally be filled with traffic. Luckily, there were no air raid sirens.
Before the war, Anton was a dentist, and Anastasia was a nurse in the oncology unit of a hospital. (She shaves her head in solidarity with her patients). Since the Russian attacks, they’ve been running a makeshift pharmacy out of what used to be a hipster coffee shop. Instead of doling out overpriced cappuccinos, Anton and Anastasia are getting medicine like antibiotics and other supplies to elderly and sick Kharkiv residents through a network of volunteers.
They’ve been working around the clock for weeks. Now it was important for them to get married. None of us had ever seen a wedding like this. It was the best one I’ve ever been to. This wedding was for the whole city, and for the whole country.
Anton and Anastasia were a couple full of life and fighting back by simply declaring: Despite all this, we will plan for the future. It was like they were saying to the Russians: You may try to take away our future, but there WILL be one. Anton and Anastasia have no plans to go on a honeymoon anytime soon. One day, they want to go somewhere with a beach and palm trees. Before that happens, there is a war to win, and brutal days ahead. But yesterday, there was hope, and beauty, and love inside the ugliness.
sometimes i think about village sign languages and. man…
they’re these languages that emerge in isolated communities with a high incidence of deafness. and high is relative - there might be only a dozen or so Deaf citizens, but the whole community, Deaf and hearing alike, build and use the language together. in daily life, in homes and workplaces, in the street. languages unique to one town, one valley, even one family! they happen all over the world. (if you want to look into them there’s some cool work here)
but they’re fragile by nature. people move, settle, and marry; their village sign languages form and fade.
and that means there must have been… so many of them. so many. thousands and thousands, since, like, the earliest days of the human species. people just do this when conditions are right! they have always done it! a sea of lights flickering on and off and on and off, illuminating homes that are made and changed and remade. we’ll never know them. we’ll never know.
i just. i think about all that loss and all that life. it’s not an eternal flame, language, it’s a garden. we are continually tending it for each other. because, like food, we need it to survive.
“The less you eat, drink and read books; the less you go to the theatre, the dance hall, the public-house; the less you think, love, theorize, paint, sing, fence, etc., the more you save—the greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor dust will devour—your capital. The less you are, the more you have; the less you express your own life, the greater is your alienated life—the greater is the store of your estranged being.
Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844
