“Since I live many hundreds of miles from Ukraine, away from this war, in my comfortable American garden, what right could I have to write about this war? And yet I can’t stop writing about it,” confesses the Ukrainian poet Ilya Kaminsky. “Why this obsession? Among the sentences there is the silence that I don’t control.”
In the silence between sentences the unspeakable may appear. In this frame we see a man holding another man’s skull in the palm of his hand. He is not theater. Igor Mangushev, a Russian nationalist, offers the gaze of those present the macabre trophy of the skull of a Ukrainian soldier who died in the Azovstal steel mill. The disturbing paradox of Mangushev’s performance is that his words say one thing-
We are at war with ideas
and the gesture affirms it, reveals another. Among the sentences there is the silence that no one controls, the denial of pity and civilization, the mournful dementia of a Hamlet who recites the inhuman, and chooses the scariest “not to be”.