by Andrea Scrima
Here are Part I, Part II, Part III, and Part IV of this project. Images from the exhibition LOOPY LOONIES at Kunsthaus Graz, Austria, can be seen here.
15. QUO VADIS?
(Where Are You Going?)
As children, we rely on the help of our caregivers and our innate capacity to learn. And we learn quickly: to protest against the things we do not like, to demand the things we want, to shamelessly push aside siblings, schoolmates, playground companions to grab whatever prize is at stake. Or have you forgotten how ruthless childhood can be? Only later do we learn to share; although adulthood teaches us better manners, these basic instincts remain.
Saint Peter, encountering a resurrected Christ along the Appian Way, asks “whither goest thou?” Jesus responds that if Peter deserts his people, He will continue on to Rome to be crucified a second time, whereupon Peter takes heart and returns to meet his fate. In reminding us to reassess our decisions, the question Quo Vadis? urges us to come clean about the rationalizations we present to the world and to admit to ourselves our shame and our cowardice. Yet it also contains another meaning: that we are knowingly exposing ourselves to certain punishment. If we return to Rome, it is to face a danger we may have only just managed to escape. But what do we achieve when we put our lives on the line, and who will we help in doing so?
Behind the question lies another question. Peter is running not toward anything but away from persecution and, ultimately, his own execution—but he is abandoning, in the process, his faith, his followers, and everything he has previously stood for. What is a life worth? And what is worth giving one’s life for? To ask this today sounds like madness; it is the language of fanatics, of zealots, of the mentally unstable. We live in a world of moral relativism in which taking an ethical stance is regarded—and scoffed at—as a pose, a bid for attention. We convince ourselves that the truth is both to complex and too subtle to warrant reckless, drastic acts; that the emotions we feel—the disgust, the fear, the outrage, the self-loathing—are too roughly hewn to be mistaken for the demands of the conscience, which we imagine as something abstract and pure. Our awe at the spectacle of self-sacrifice turns to repulsion; unable to imagine it as a decision a person may arrive at through an act of logical reasoning, we view it as something foreign and grotesque. Quo vadis? We are called upon to consider the values we profess and ask ourselves whether we actually practice them. We mistake our equivocations for wisdom, our compromises for judiciousness. Yet behind them lie our most basic instincts, first and foremost our will to survive—stripped now of the innocence of childhood, because we have lived long enough to see the consequences of our inaction.
16. KOWTOW (Cowardice)
Is there a way to speak about what has been happening? When language has been rubbed clean of its meaning and we have not yet found a new one, how do we describe what we see and think? Various words come to mind, yet we hesitate to say them out loud; they carry an urgency, a pathos we shrink from because we somehow fear it will cling to us like a bad odor. Strong statements make strong demands; they require us to act; they draw attention. There are various reasons why this can feel undesirable. Where uttering certain words carries adverse consequences, we become circumspect, offer no more than a veiled hint to test for common ground. More often than not, we remain silent.
It is becoming more and more difficult to maintain the façade. We once believed we were the civilized world, that we stood for all the noble things: peace and prosperity, law and justice, innovation and progress, culture in all its forms. Before it became too risky to do so, some of us occasionally offered lip service to the fact that all this abundance was based on the absence of peace, the absence of law and justice elsewhere; with the best of intentions, we even absorbed an after-image of this reality into our cultural expressions, where, tamed by various discourses, it carried little consequence. Now, however, something has shifted, and those in power no longer attempt to deny their brazen aims or deem it necessary to cloak them in a semblance of goodwill.
Whether or not we agree that humanity is unable to cooperate or address the challenges facing us—and that global wealth is concerned not with contributing to solutions, but with saving its own skin—change hinges on countless acts of individual resistance. In “Writing as Seeing,” Claudia Rankine’s opening speech for the 2025 Berlin Poetry Festival, she addresses the flood of anguished images she sees in her feeds and is prevented from speaking about openly due to the “banning of words and the policing of both thought and movement.” She says: “I am failing myself because I have not said what should be said.” And yet she manages to say it nonetheless, manages to circumvent the unsayability—the ways in which we “terrorize our own senses, when we say no to what we have seen [. . .]”—to find vehicles to express what should, what must be said. Because to shy away from the effort required to overcome our cowardice is to give up without trying; it falsifies the relationship we have with ourselves, with others, and with the reality surrounding us, and it severs us from the source of our own resolve.
17. JADED (NUMB)
We don’t generally notice precisely when it happens, and in all likelihood it occurs in degrees, but there comes a moment when we realize that our emotional response to the never-ending onslaught of atrocity and carnage we bear vicarious witness to on a daily basis has changed; that we no longer feel as much or as deeply as we used to. There was a time, for instance, when the sight of a news photograph of a thirteen-year-old boy whose arms were blown off by a bomb only hours before could send the world into a tailspin and bring everyday life to a halt. More than twenty years after the US invasion of Iraq, our feeds were flooded by equivalent images that captured the inconceivable misery and suffering in Gaza. Although many are indelibly branded in our minds and we are unlikely to forget them in this lifetime, they have nonetheless undergone an inflation. We remain with them, we study the details, imagine ourselves experiencing the harrowing scenes we see—standing before the rubble of what was once our house, or gathering the scattered parts of what, only moments before, was a living, breathing, frightened child—but we have grown numb, rendered speechless in the face of such glaring injustice.
Desensitization in response to overexposure is an inevitable part of human nature; disoriented by our own growing indifference, the scale of what is playing out before our eyes is nonetheless shockingly clear. Yet we know from experience that when a group of passersby witnesses an unprovoked assault, only very few will take the risk upon themselves to intervene. Moral outrage, then, is also an instinct, a gut reaction that some seem more predisposed to than others. There is no time to stop and think; our response is spontaneous, a reflex. Others remain silent or run away; only later, in private, do they face the shame of their fear and cowardice.
In a time when language is subject to routine punitive measures and speaking out can cost us our reputations and our livelihoods, we find ways to justify our silence. But are we aware of the violence we are doing to ourselves? As Omar El Akkad writes in One day, everyone will have always been against this: “There is no terrible thing coming for you in some distant future, but know that a terrible thing is happening to you now. You are being asked to kill off a part of you that would otherwise scream in opposition to injustice. You are being asked to dismantle the machinery of a functioning conscience.”
18. MEA CULPA (SHAME)
I raise a cup of coffee to my lips and take a sip; I scroll through my Instagram feed and see people trapped in dire circumstances. From my protected purview I observe hollow-eyed children crowding around aid workers already aware that there is not enough to go around; I observe small shrouded bodies lying limp in the arms of loved ones too numbed by pain to understand what has happened to them. Together, we are caught in a radical asymmetry: I can allow myself to be distracted by another news story or reel, or I can put the phone down, check emails, go out for a walk. I grab lunch somewhere and log back in; I have become something I was never able to imagine before, a creature capable of biting into a sandwich while perusing images of starvation.
Many years ago, walking hand in hand with my three-year-old son, we passed a homeless man near Hermannplatz in Berlin. My son tugged at my sleeve and, instinctively understanding the man’s situation, asked why we weren’t helping him. He’s homeless, I answered, but this was not an answer. He’s mentally ill. There are organizations that take care of these people, I added, although I knew it was a lie. How do you tell a small child that you’ve trained yourself not to care; how do you confront the fact that you are teaching him the same? A few years later, in the subway, we encountered a young girl begging for money in a voice that was barely audible. She couldn’t have been more than seventeen, she was an addict, and her complexion was an alarming shade of gray. When she got off the train and the doors closed behind her, I suddenly realized that she might not survive the night, that someone should take her to the hospital and watch out for her. I grabbed my son’s hand, got off the next stop, and hurried back to find her, but of course she was gone.
In I Am Still Alive: Dispatches from Gaza, Mahmoud M Al-Shaer writes: “I’ve always feared the weight of writing, the way it forces you to confront your brokenness.” But if Mahmoud’s brokenness consists in an inability to inhabit the present without seeing anything not yet reduced to rubble as nothing more than a memory-to-be, a site destined for imminent destruction, then what does our brokenness consist in? The shame we feel or should be feeling as we witness atrocities from the comfort of our sofas or desks—the shame of being safe while others are not, of being able to sleep through the night on a bed with clean linen, of not being forced to dedicate every waking moment to our day-to-day survival—still does not translate into action. What, then, does it take to do something?