This Silence

I have been wondering to myself--even talking aloud in my dream(?)--why the inability to post anything these past two weeks, especially since I had intended to write some commentary on two important events that happened here at The Clark: the Art History and Diaspora conference in late April, and Linda Nochlin's public conversation with Academic and Research Director, Michael Ann Holly and Aruna D'Souza, Clark Fellow, earlier this month. It just happens that my mind is seized by weightier events happening in our world: the tragedy in Myanmar, that makes me for once regret that there is this thing called national sovereignty, which is the only reason the world watches with numbing horror as criminals in soldiers' uniform (the bloody dictators) refuse help for their fellow citizens, spared by the terror cyclone, but now wasting, their fates in the grip of unrelenting, merciless nature; and the sight of children, so many children, buried under compromised concrete graves that were once school buildings, and the haunting tap-tap knocks of rescuers hoping for faint echoes of dwindling survivors amid the apocalyptic rubble, in the aftermath of the earthquake in SW China. And, yesterday, a petroleum pipeline explosion in Lagos incinerated perhaps hundreds of my compatriots in Nigeria; victims who, without regular power supply and utterly impoverished, gather with candescent lamps each time there's a leaking manna from S/hell.

The last thing I think of at the moment, is the art world. Till another day.