In A Part of Speech Less Than One, his first collection of essays, Joseph Brodsky tells a story of a day in the gulag when the guards challenged the prisoners to a wood chopping competition. One inmate asked what would happen if he refused. (I've given away my copy of the collection, or more properly, given away my third copy to a third someone, so I'm paraphrasing in a prose far less compelling than the original–meaning both an excuse and a recommendation that you read the essay.) The guards apparently replied, then you don't eat. The competition starts, and the prisoner get to chopping until lunch, when all go to eat save the man who asked the question. He continues to chop and not only through lunch. He chops through dinner and through much of night, and over this time the guards move from ridiculing this odd act of defiance to watching in horror and eventually turning away.
For Brodsky, this was turning the other cheek. To place the story in context, the essay is a commencement address, and he was addressing the class on what one can do when faced with an overpowering evil. The answer for Brodsky was given by a reading of the sermon on the mount, the section on turning the other cheek.
If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if someone wants to sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well. If someone forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles. (Matthew 5:38-42)
Noting that each demand in the triad was met with 'submission' greater than what was asked, he had taken from this passage a different lesson than Tolstoy, Gandhi or King. Rather than a moral about pacifism, he saw in it a strategy for when your back is against the wall, of responding to the demands of an unjust but overpowering adversary with the volume of your compliance, of letting “mass production” render their enterprise absurd. (Again, I paraphrase.)
Amitava's piece on the conceptual artist Hasan Elahi, in
Pratilipi, reminded me of Brodsky's essay:
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