The Bard College Berlin Student Blog
“Impasse 1: ‘…whether the elements have being potentially, or in some other way…’”
What?
Prepare to engage in the story of a small, motley crew of BCB students – with little to their names but enthusiasm and sometimes-precarious ideas – organising the next Liberal Education Student Conference, through a series of impasses.
It was a brisk but sunny day in the spring semester of 2016, in a Forms of Love seminar on the Symposium taught by Geoff Lehman, when my approach to my studies shifted entirely. The Republic, I admit, to my enduring shame, did little to convince me of its worthiness of study, but Beauty — ah!
Especially when fighting from the margins, it is imperative to be seen. And especially when having a platform — no matter its size — it is imperative for writers to bring those issues out from the margins and offer public support. That is what writing means to me.
It’s no secret that Bard College Berlin has an astonishingly small student body — small enough that I could look around one afternoon in the cafeteria and recognize all but a few faces. But how many of us truly know the people behind them? I sat down one day with the Associate Dean Kerry Bystrom to hear her story.
We meet early in the morning. I roll in on my bike with breakfast for Danny. He looks sleepy but greets me with a warm smile, and I know we are both exhausted but excited. We unroll some canvases, tape them onto the Ikea painting frames belonging to the café, and hang them up.
Instead of efforts to combat the root causes of the country’s serious insecurity, Bolsonaro has chosen to address the issue through superficial and violent approaches, such as easing the regulations of gun possession — both for civilians and for the military/police — and relaxing the import restrictions on guns.
Warren Binford, a lawyer who interviewed children in the immigrant detention center in Clint, Texas, reported that this facility was three times over capacity — over 350 children were housed in a center intended for a maximum of 104. The children were malnourished and were given the same extremely processed food everyday.
Naomi did not want a man: she wanted a child for herself, a child raised in the city – running around in the dark alleys and playing in the lush courtyards of her own childhood, munching on sweet, warm challah from the baker on the corner and living on the fifth story…
The wet thunk of plummeting metal impacting animal matter. The watermelon-ish explosion emanating from the point of impact. The unspeakable splatter. The ghastly silence before the screams. The seemingly endless instant before reflex, the guilty party, the murderer, intervened too late, forcing his eyes from the spectacle, his body back from the edge.
