In conjunction with the New York Peace Museum we hosted another guest speaker referred to us by a museum board member. As this speaker was heralding from Germany, she insisted we hold our talk earlier in the day, even requested a morning meeting. I explained to her that the morning was impossible and even the afternoon was challenging because the weather was fantastic and people were anxious to spend as much time outdoors as possible now that we’re all anticipating with a dark sense of dread the onset of winter and the limitation to our outdoor socializing. I warned her that we would get a small group, and sure enough we did. As it turned out this was just as well.
At the top of the Zoom our guest informed us that she was presenting “something new” which she “hadn’t tried before” and she was busily establishing her “energy.” As a couple regulars rolled in I started chatting about what was going on, as I usually do, especially because I like to allow about twenty minutes before beginning a talk so latecomers can enjoy it from the start. The big news of the weekend was that our president had contracted COVID at what turned out to be super spreader events in the Rose Garden and at a NJ fundraiser. I asked a regular, who is a physician, about his opinion about how sick the president might be. Our guest promptly shut this conversation down admonishing me that she had already “created the energy” and we couldn’t have negative talk about sickness or anything because that would impede her effort for positivity. This of course irritated me. However, I attempted to accommodate by asking her questions about herself, where she’s from, what she plans to talk about, etc. She shut that down too, saying “all would be revealed” during her talk. It was all I could do to not roll my eyes. So I said fine, just start your talk, do your thing, and if people log on midway let’s just hope they’re quiet about it.
Perhaps because she noticed I wasn’t convinced by her argument that we needed to maintain an “uplifted energy” she hesitated to begin. She didn’t exactly ask why, but she seemed curious as to why I was not swayed by her enthusiasm to manage the “energy” and direction of the Zoom in the direction she saw fit. I found myself defending PareaGroove in a way that surprised me, it lead to me defining the importance of this endeavor to me and our loyal crew, explicitly, in a way I hadn’t done so before. Those on the call nodded quietly as I did.
I explained to her that we started PareaGroove to combat the stress of quarantine isolation. I told her that in the last six months we found that sharing the current news, the information we had about what was happening with the pandemic, both the medical and political aspects, and about what was happening with our government and the seeming threat to our democracy, and about the protests in the street, about our lives during these strange times, and now what with our president getting sick and about what could possibly be a security threat to our country, was actually stress-relieving, rather than stressful. Addressing the very large elephants in all our rooms right now, together, has proven to be very helpful and supportive. I advised her that to minimize this experience was insulting. She responded by thanking me for explaining the “current socio-economic” situation in our country. Again, I congratulated myself for not rolling my eyes.
Her talk, given assertively and passionately, was fundamentally a recitation of her biography, with occasional new-agey, flourishes. She began by fluttering her hands in the camera and asking “do you know what this is?” Of course we didn’t. Satisfied that she could elucidate us she explained that this was the “Egyptian Lotus.” Do you know what the Egyptian Lotus is? she asked. She then explained, I think, since it was a tad vague and buried in a lot of extra words, that it symbolized a group coming together, maybe even like our group. She then talked about a film she made about Bedouin women in Egypt, where she was born. She explained making her film endangered the lives of these women as they would be killed if it were discovered they revealed their faces. She then reiterated that she is a spiritual and brave woman for doing her work, which I think included making a film or two and then attending an international studies graduate program. At graduate school she helped a group of jazz musicians from otherwise warring countries to perform in concerts around Africa and she told us, as if revealing a fascinating new discovery, that music is a great way to bring cultures together. It sounded like a great project, but not a great revelation. She told us that all these experiences led her to understand that “the only thing” she can call herself is “a human being . . . this is the most difficult thing.” And somehow from this she came to the term “holographic being,” which for me elicited images of celebrity hologram concerts, novelty hologram toys, and that little chip on our credit cards that seems to have moving shapes. She then told us that on a vacation to Luxor she discovered the “Akashic Records,” and that this was very significant to her and important to her project, but then refused to talk about it further or answer any questions about this, as somehow it was too important to share with us. Again, my eyes had to be aggressively restrained from rolling. She was happier telling us her history, of growing up in Egypt as the daughter of an artist, “imagine, a child listening under her father’s table,” and leaving her country at age twenty since it wasn’t really so good for women there back in the 1980s and to “imagine how challenging that was, a virtual child with no experience.” I have the utmost respect for people who have the courage to pick up and start over in a new land with a new language. But still, all the “I” sentences were getting to me.
Our regulars who showed are a polite, intelligent, and arguably compassionate bunch. They gingerly found subjects about which she was willing to speak and asked questions she enjoyed answering. One shared her experience and thoughts about meeting people on her travels and how that she found this was a great way to grow oneself, and she drew our guest out on that topic for quite a bit. In the course of the travel conversation I mentioned I had been to Cairo as a student back when she had just left and had been appalled by how rude the men in the street were to me, so I could only imagine how they might be to their own women. She then blurted something to the effect of “oh please, of course, my uncle, my brother, all bothered me. ” I don’t know if anyone else noticed, but from that moment I was able to find that nugget of compassion for her indulgence that eluded me before. So I backed down and let the others take over the remainder of our time with their polite questions. She also seemed to relax after that moment of personal revelation. When it seemed the group had run out of questions I suggested we speak about current events and invited her to stay or drop off as she wished. She stayed for quite a bit longer than I would have anticipated listening to our conversation about our current goings on, and only dropped off when it became too late to keep her eyes open.
