Thoughts of an apocalypse strike people in so many different ways.  The end of the world can come through natural disasters, deadly viruses, nuclear radiation, monsters or zombies, animal uprisings, psychological crisis, etc etc.  Just the fact that many of the potential causes for the destruction of our world are rooted in humanity itself is a frightening thought.  The human race is essentially suicidal, or at least in a sense cannibalistic.  We have already come close to annihilating a group within our own species: the Jews.  Not to mention the other genocides that plague our history.  The German Nazi’s preyed on those weaker than them, considering the Jews to be less then men.  They also captured, tortured, and killed many people from other nationalities including Italians, Pollocks, Russians, Hungarians etc that were criminals.  They wanted to rid the world of the filth, the dirty, the undeserving people.  It was survival of the fittest and only the best and most beautiful races of humans were spared from their torturous death camps.  However, their psychological health was not spared.

A Nazi work camp was probably the most fear-drenched place that ever could exist.  How does one endure the punishments, the unreasonable work, the lack of food, and the psychological strain?  Primo Levi was a Jewish-Italian chemist that survived the Holocaust.  He has written several books about his year-long imprisonment in Auschwitz death camp.  In his book Moments of Reprieve, he tells stories not directly about his treatment in Auschwitz, not about the Nazi guards and the threat of gas chambers, but about the people he met there.  The men he struggled for survival alongside.  He writes that,

Without any deliberate effort, memory continues to restore to me events, faces, words, sensations, as if at that time my mind had gone through a period of exalted receptivity, during which not a detail was lost.  I remember, for example, as they would be remembered by a tape recorder or a parrot, whole sentences in languages I did not know then, and don’t know now.  A few years ago I met, after thirty-five years, a fellow prisoner with whom I had not had any special friendship, and I recognized him immediately in the midst of a great number of unknown faces, although his physiognomy was greatly changed.  Smells from “down there” startle me even now.  It seems to me obvious today that this attention of mine at that time, turned to the world and to the human beings around me, was not only a symptom but also an important factor of spiritual and physical salvation (Levi 11).

This is a common trait among all people faced with imminent death and the severe lack of hope for survival.  It is often through the mutual encouragement and support of other victims of disaster that one can hold on to the will to live.  We’ve seen it within every film we have watched this semester.  When the world is going to end, or already has, people bind themselves with other people.  In Safe, Carol admits herself to the Wrenwood center, not only for the clean environment but to also be with others that understand her issues.  In The Dawn of the Dead, Fran, Peter, and Roger work together to set up a new life in the mall.  In The Road Warrior, although Max usually goes his own way, he sticks around to help the oil clan escape from the outside rangers.  Although it is very hard to trust people in these extreme life-or-death situations, the victims always find someone to rely on.  This is what Primo Levi, and all other death camp prisoners, did during the Holocaust.

Levi tells the story of his last Christmas in Auschwitz.  All of the prisoners (political, social, criminal, homosexual, etc), except the Jews, were allowed to receive packages from outside the camp for Christmas.  Somehow, Levi’s family managed to smuggle a package from person to person across country and through the barbed wire to his hands.  What a gift!  Levi knew he had to split it up with another person.  He could not eat it all at once, and he could not keep it safe from the guards and other prisoners by himself.  His friend Alberto, another Italian, was the one he could trust with these highly prized possessions.  They sewed hidden pockets to the inside of their jackets and hats to hold the treats.  One day, Levi’s jacket was stolen while he was in the showers, losing half of their “gold”.  However, Alberto was so trustworthy that he gave back half of the share Levi had given him (Levi 85-96).  The victims of the Holocaust knew that they only had each other, and that is where their hope for survival resided.

Another example of this act of bonding together in a fight for survival is the story of the Bielski brothers.  Their story, as shown through the film Defiance, is one of courage, community, and fighting back against the German Nazi’s.  After their parents were killed, they fled to the forests.  More and more Jews came to them, from the Jewish ghettos, for help and protection.  They eventually built a camp in the forest, organized and assigned tasks to each “member” of their new community, and fought back against the Germans in conjunction with a group of Russian partisans.  Daniel Craig’s character, Tuvia Bielski, says in the film, “We may be hunted like animals, but we will not become animals (Zwick).”  This is absolutely true.  They all felt a need to fight, to survive, to have family.  Because they set up an actual community and had relationships with others in their camp, they lived.    This goes beyond the actual physical act of being alive, of breathing and having a beating heart, but actually having some sense of life, of purpose and passion.  This is what made the difference in their fight.  They faced their opposition as people, not the animals that their enemies were.

Besides the fact that being treated as a slave laborer is extremely taxing on one’s physical body, it also takes its toll on the psychological health of a person.  Having your entire life being taken from you, your family and friends, your hard earned money and possessions, your dreams and ambitions, is a huge blow to a person.  Everything you once knew is gone and now here you are, captured by many people that hate you just because of your race or religion.  The Nazi’s didn’t treat their prisoners as people at all.  They had no names, only numbers sewn onto their jacket as a way to identity and categorize.  Constantly being referred to as vermin, less than a person, and filth can get inside people’s heads and eventually they will start to believe that it is true, that they are not worthy to live as a free person, if at all.  This concept of identity is another huge aspect of apocalyptic cinema.  The film Invasion of the Body Snatchers is entirely centered around this idea.  Safe deals with the psychological apocalypse of an individual.  The scientists in 12 Monkeys treated their prisoners as guinea pigs for the scientific research and experiments, without the consideration that they were people too.  The psychological strain of being in the death camps has a much longer lasting effect than any of the physical strains that they endured.

Mauricio Lasansky is an American printmaker that, although he was not a victim of the Holocaust, is an extreme empathizer for the Jews.  From 1960 to 1966, he worked to complete a series of thirty drawings called “The Nazi Drawings.”  He said,

Dignity is not a symbol bestowed on man, nor does the word itself possess force.  Man’s dignity is a force and the only modus vivendi [mode of living] by which man and his history survive.  When mid-twentieth century Germany did not let man live and die with this right, man became an animal.  No matter how technologically advanced or sophisticated, when man negates this divine right, he not only becomes self-destructive, but castrates his history and poisons our future.  This is what The Nazi Drawings are about (Lasansky).

Lasansky, through his drawings, is there in the camps understanding the horror that the Jews faced.  He examines what people do to each other when they lose all human, moral, and spiritual values.  His drawings are a continual remembrance of what it meant to survive that nightmare.  They show what it means to be alive or dead, or at the point where it does not even matter which side of the line you are on (Honig).

Viewing his drawings, most life size, sucks one into the head of a Holocaust victim.  They are heavy, cold, gripping, and absolutely full of emotion, drama, horror, and anxiety.  They are dark and tell a sad story of the abuse and death of innocent people.

These drawings show the permanent psychological harm that the survivors of the Holocaust live with everyday.  This is something that can break through any sort of protection.  Their trust and relationship with other prisoners in the camp can give them the will to live and survive and escape the camp itself, but they can do nothing for the psychological state of imprisonment they will live with forever.

Lasansky’s drawings matched with Levi’s comment about his heightened memory of exact conversations, descriptions, and actions that occurred in Auschwitz show that the apocalypse did not end when the prisoners were released.  The Jewish population was not threatened with extinction anymore, but they were left in shambles.  The individual survivors from the camps were not starved and beaten anymore, but they were left with memories from that living nightmare.  Lasansky’s drawings not only tell of the struggle of Jews during the Holocaust, but also give us a glimpse into what the survivor’s thoughts and memories must look like.

Each prisoner was freed from the barbed wire fences, only to be imprisoned again inside their mind, fighting the memories.

Well, it has been observed by psychologists that the survivors of traumatic events are divided into two well-defined groups: those who repress their past en bloc [all together], and those whose memory of the offense persists, as though carved in stone, prevailing over all previous or subsequent experiences (Levi 10-11).

Either the survivor manages to completely wipe this horrible time in their lives from the memories, or can recall it as clearly as if it had happened five minutes ago.  This first group of survivors, although has forced themselves to forget the horror of their persecution, still lives with that chunk of their lives that is missing.  This black hole will continue to haunt them no matter what.  The second group, of which Primo Levi belongs to, must learn to live with the horrendous memories just as they learned to live within the death camps.

This psychological harm is something that can break through any sort of protection.  The survivors’ trust and relationship with other prisoners in the camp gave them the will to live and survive and escape the camp itself, but they can do nothing to ease the pain of the psychological state of imprisonment they will live in forever.  Those people that they created a community with inside the camps, in order to survive, are now what plagues their dreams.  The survivors often remember the people they encountered in the camp the most clearly and having vivid clear faces appear in their dreams and memories makes it so much more frightening than just remembering the events.  A new apocalypse threatens their sanity.  They will never be completely free from the fear associated with the Holocaust.

The Holocaust itself is a topic that no one really likes to talk about.  It is a dark spot on the timeline of the history of humankind, as well as many individual’s history.  However it carries with the horror, a message to be heard.  Films, books, and fine art are drawn to issues like these because there is still always something to said about the issue.  Even though it is a gruesome history, it is one that interests us like nothing else.  We, as humans, always carry with us the fear of the unknown, the fear of death, the fear of annihilation, the fear of the apocalypse.  In our history, there are events that did bring us close to “the end of the world”.  Nuclear war and genocide are dangerous, dangerous aspects of our existence and through studying our mistakes in the past, we can hopefully prevent the same mistakes from happening again in the future.

I deleted the images that are inserted within the paper but check out the “Nazi Drawings” here:  http://www.lasanskyart.com/art/collections/nazidrawings.shtml

Anyways, I’ve been thinking more and more lately about what direction I’ll be focusing on with my research and work this upcoming semester.  I’m enrolled in two advanced/independent study type printmaking studios and one advancing drawing studio, along with some other filler credits, so I’m really going to have to know what I want to do.

Right now I’m doing some research for my final project for one of my summer classes – Apocalyptic Cinema.  This class was so baller.  Besides the fact that for every class we basically just talked and watched clips of movies and watched a full-length feature film, there were a lot of deadly man-made viruses, tornadoes, bombs, zombies, fire, etc etc etc cool things.  This class really really inspired me though.  It brought me back to a semester-long project I did last year when I just started to get into my gasmask obsession and severe interest in artifacts of devastation.  At the time, I was caught up in the fear that a gasmask represents… and that was it.  I had hit a wall.  So I started to move on a little deeper to ideas surrounding restriction of the breath, and then bam.  I hit that wall again.  I was in a mental rut that I didn’t know how to get out off.

But now I think I’ve broken through.  All of the concepts we discussed in this apocalyptic film class brought everything full circle for me:  the fear of the unknown, the inevitability of disaster, the complexity of knowledge, the push-pull relationship between too much or too little info…  This is what I was trying to get at all along.  How people deal with the possibility of an apocalypse, of annihilation.  This touches base not only on a global level – if a deadly virus was released and we all died, or if we fell into nuclear war and fall-out radiation plagued the surface of the Earth – but can also be connected to on a personal level – if outside forces change your own individual world, causing it to crumble and push you into insanity.

How do you act?  Do you control your fear or does it overtake you?  How do you trust people?  Where do you find hope for survival?  How do your day-to-day activities change?  What are your new priorities?  How do you relate to your family, friends, acquaintances with this new mindset?  These are the questions, along with so many more, I’ve started to ask.

It’s really interesting just how often ideas of the apocalypse come into play in our society.  Pretty much all of the movies dealing with destruction, zombies, horror, pandemics are based on this idea of apocalypse.  I didn’t realize how saturated our culture is with this concept until studying it in this film class.

So to start my new angle of research, I’m headed right back to where I was a couple months ago – the Holocaust.  I don’t know if there is anything else as close to annihilation as the Holocaust was.  I’m looking at the inside culture of concentration camps – not focusing on how the Nazi’s tortured and killed the victims, or how people on the outside viewed the entire circumstance, but how the victims in the camps dealt with the fear, how they held onto the slightest strand of hope, and how the survivors adjusted to life outside of the camp after they were released.  Looking at it from this perspective isn’t nearly as depressing as the point-of-view I took with this same topic a couple months ago.  And so to start, I picked up a couple books written by concentration camp survivors, telling their story of life behind the barbed wire.  The first book I’m reading is Moments of Reprieve: A Memoir of Auschwitz, by Primo Levi, an Italian.  He writes about his memories of the people he bunked with, carried bricks alongside, thought up plans on how to hide their smuggled food, etc.  It’s a very real account of the day to day struggle to survive, with only the occasion mention of beatings or the gas chambers.

I’m not sure what else to say about these ideas right now.  I need to get deeper into research mode before I have more thoughts to share, because right now it’s like a tornado in my brain – so many questions and images violently swirling around trying to find some answers in order to create balance.

Anyway.  So basically besides work I haven’t been doing much.  Finishing unpacking and basking in the glory of being close to so many cool places and having sweet neighbors.  Getting back into drawing and reading and writing too after the whole moving break.  And now I’m 21.  Didn’t do anything crazy, just went to a hole-in-the-wall bar near my new house and got a couple beers with some coworkers.  Didn’t even get carded.  Lame.  Whatever.  Birthday’s aren’t a huge deal for me, and this one wasn’t any different.  It just makes getting a bottle of wine at the grocery store more convenient.

“Forrest Gump had it all wrong.. life is not like a box of chocolates. Sure, you never know what you’re going to get, but it certainly isn’t one sweet experience after another. It’s more like a big box of dirt.. or a garden, if you will. What grows out of it depends on what you plant. It isn’t static; things are constantly growing – sometimes for better, sometimes not. You never know when a weed, bug, or even snake will invade your space, but it also depends on how you maintain it…….”

It meant a lot more to me then than it does now, but I still really really appreciate it.  He’s a good wise dude and unfortunately sometimes I forget that.

On a different note, my knee has apparently decided to go on strike again.  Now that it’s nice out, I’ve been biking a whole lot more, and likewise my knee has been popping like a bag of burnt popcorn.  So now I’m back to wearing my bionic knee brace and fighting through the physical therapy schedule that I did in high school.  If a month of this “suicide strength building” doesn’t help, I’m going to be sent back to my knee specialist, who will probably talk about another, forth, surgery.  Please no.  I just want to ride my bike.

The semester ended a lot smoother than it began.  Fortunately I never did have to pull an all-nighter but it was still about 3 weeks of constant work on projects except for the time when I was slinging coffee at work.  My work has veered away from WWII imagery and themes related to the Holocaust.  I’ve been focusing more and more on the psychological response to being restricted, specifically relating to the breath, and on some sort of outside force controlling internal bodily functions such as respiration and heart rate.  I haven’t completely wrapped my mind around it yet and really came to a conclusion as to just what angle I want to use to approach this concept, but I feel like I have a good start on it.  I’ve spent the last month rummaging through old medical encyclopedias, collecting anatomical illustrations, recording sounds, and taking notes about the mundane things we encounter everyday and sadly quickly forget.  Some of my projects were far less successful than others but it’s all a learning experience right?  I’ll be documenting my most recent work soon so stay tuned for those images to show up on my inkteraction page.

The start of summer has also brought Sar back to us from the lovely land of Italy.  We are both currently sitting in the living room on our laptops, because after all that is what we do best.  It’s good to have her home.  I’ve missed her more than I realized and we picked up right where we left off when she carried her suitcase down the front stairs back in January.  Unfortunately we are roommates for only 2 more weeks.  Grooters and I are moving further away from campus at the beginning of June.  The new house is super sweet and in a cool part of town.  The owners just finished a bunch of remodeling and painting and put in new carpet and basically it’s going to be awesome.  I’m not looking forward to moving though.  I have a really bad habit of collecting just every random thing I find.  I have way too many books and scraps of fabric and spray paint and seven different kinds of tape and cutting mats and cameras and jars full of ink and rusty things and etc etc etc.  

Hello my name is Pachy, and I am a pack rat.

Moving will force me to re-organize everything and trash a bunch of stuff though.  Which I obviously really need to do.  But the process of doing it is still going to suck.

Ugh I should be working on that right now actually.  Um.  OK.  I’ll do it.  Bye

Last night I had some crazy dream…  I can’t really remember what it was all about anymore but I remember that it was pretty violent.  At one point, I was pinned down and sharp things were being driven into my shoulders.  I then woke up to find my roommates cat standing on my chest and shoulders…  So maybe that was all that was causing the dream, but still…

Yesterday I had a critique in my mixed media/collage class in which I was presenting a three piece series that consisted of digital prints of pretty graphic images from the concentration camp Buchenwald.  Rows of dead bodies looked like they had started rotting even before the last breath was taken.  Mangled limbs and gaunt faces with glassy eyes stared out from a wagon.  I had then spray painted over the images in red, white, and blue and purposely let the paint drastically drip down over the surface.  Long story short: I was thinking about the vandalism of people, why we need to be reminded of it sometimes, and how ignorant and disconnected I feel America is towards the Holocaust.  Anyway, in critique my professor asked me if I feel unaffected by these gruesome images…why I’m working with this subject matter, what drives me to do it…  like I’ve said before, I don’t know…  Then he went on to tell about how he also went through a similar stage in his work when he was doing his undergrad.  He did large paintings of Holocaust images with white-washed plexiglass covering the canvas, masking and revealing these stricken bodies.  During a critique his professor had asked him, “Who are you trying to offend?”  After a moment he replied, “…Me, I guess.”

This hit me.  Sometimes I’ll stare at one of these horrific images for hours on photoshop and feel nothing.  Other times I’ll stop and realize just what I’m looking at and get very sick to my stomach and have to put it away for a while.  I think that unconsciously I really am trying to understand what happened.  I’m trying to sympathize with the victims.  I had a pretty tame childhood.  I didn’t have to deal with any major issues within my family or deal with a lot of deaths.  Maybe I started to be drawn to these images because it is so unfamiliar, almost unreal.

After that critique, I looked at my recent work with fresh eyes.  I do feel offended by these images now.  Maybe now that I have realized this I can really move on.