“In my life, I have never encountered a sincere friend as mine.”
(Henry David Thoreau)
Since the crisis of “Covid-19” flared up, millions of people around the world occupy these weeks only how they can kill time in order to adhere to the domestic stone imposed in several countries until the crisis has passed or the discovery of a cure for the deadly virus in some cases, while health systems are busy globally with awareness Prevention and attempts to discover the appropriate antidote, the most important question in social circles revolves around the impact of voluntary or compulsory isolation on the lives of more than a billion people live now? And whether this isolation will redefine the way some will adapt to a new way of life that may last for some time? After all, no one knows when a virus treatment may be discovered or confined on its own, nor whether or not life will actually return to what it was before it.
Deborah Granic, the American filmmaker, answered part of these questions in 2018 when she directed the world of the movie "Leave No Trace", which is based on a true story of a father and a former American soldier who decided after his return from the war that he and his three-daughter daughter should leave. Ten in the spring to Portland, Oregon, voluntarily abandoning a stable, routine life in the city and his fellow returnees from the war, where group therapy programs for those afflicted with him are one of the most well-known mental illnesses: post-traumatic stress disorder (BTSD). PTSD).
Life on the sidelines
Granic selects a specific stage in the lives of her heroes, without going into the details of the past, whether it relates to the mother who is absent from the image of the small family, or to the war fought by Father Will (and he performed Ben Foster) and its impact is evident in his training of the daughter Tom (Thomasen McKenzie) to escape And hiding from garden visitors from strangers or police, as well as in the austere lifestyle, starting from saving in fuel and not ending wandering in the woods to hunt food from its plants and collect water from its rain and dew on the leaves of trees.
The father does not mind taking his daughter to visit the city from time to time, but it is short and secret visits during which he is keen to hide the way to reach his camp in the forest while they go on foot to the city to provide food, fuel and psychological medications that he does not eat, but he sells them in search of a little money that secures His needs, and while a few differences appear between the father and his daughter, which revolve around the difficult way of life that the girl did not choose, this will not negate her affiliation with the forest and consider her home when things go wrong and the police find the secret hideout of the family.
Tom's ability to cope quickly with the changes taking place after catching them appears, and unlike Will, she has no problem answering questions from social services employees about her way of life, and whether her sleep with her father in one tent causes her a problem or whether someone Has she touched her body without her permission before? There is no ambiguity for her that her father has provided her with her needs and a place to live in, and that "having two people in one tent makes her warmer at night," she says in one of the clips.
Film critic and editor Alisa Wilkinson says: "Leave no trace" reveals the economic and mental fees of living outside the system. It tells about the suffering of some Americans in raising a few dollars to facilitate their lives in which the world in which they live refuses to be part of it. And from their struggle, and therefore they are forced to turn to their own communities for help, and to create their own safety net. " (1)
Will has taken refuge in these private networks several times while selling his medications for money, and again he will need them after he and his daughter run away from the shelter that Social Affairs has provided him to live and work, as he will seek help from a truck driver on the road to transport him to another place where he knows that no one will He searches for him in it, and as Tom and Tom begin a new life in another unknown forest, Tom will have to seek help from the new forest dwellers when her father is injured and loses consciousness for a long time without knowing how to treat it.
"Living heroes" leave no trace "Radical presence," thus describes them (2) "Peter Bradshaw," Guardian's editor, because if they turn their backs on traditional life, they "realize what is at stake", while the heroes of the film preferred to live on the sidelines and separate from Society in its grandest form, this experience was not and will not be the last for people who decided willingly to deviate from traditional life, whether they escaped from a painful past - such as war in the case of woe - or a desire to meditate and separate for some time from the crowding of life and the acceleration of its pace, rather that the film will open a path For discussion about whether isolation - compulsory or voluntary - is one of the means Dora is not only to give individuals time for reflection and tranquility, but also a path to creativity and distinction, and perhaps diffusion and universality at times.
Out of order
“I went to the woods because I wanted to live carefully.”
(Henry David Thoreau)
The positive impact of optional isolation can be seen in the life of American author, poet and philosopher Henry David Thoreau who lived in America in the mid-nineteenth century, and is now considered one of the brightest stars of American classics because of his famous book "Walden, Life in the Forest", and in which he summarized a two-year experience lived in a lifeless Traditional land and woodland of Walden owned by his friend and mentor, Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Thoreau's life was not materially bad during the era of the American-Mexican War and the calls for the liberation of slavery and civil disobedience that he adopted since his famous article "Civil Disobedience" or "Resistance of the Civil Government" was first published in 1849, but he nevertheless chose his own isolation, so he built his cabin with his hands on Walden's land, and planted its surroundings with food to eat, while he was satisfied with fewer needs that "with which cups of tea or coffee will become pleasures, he will feel inferior (3) whenever he responds to his seduction" as he will narrate later. While Thoreau was not returning from a war that left his psychological impact on him as happened to Lowell in "Leave No Trace", he took his isolation as a champion in his battle against the advance of the industrial revolution, and against a scientist based on "competitive progress" as he called him, and from which he called for adoption " Radical freedom "as an antidote to the" quiet despair "life that human beings have become.
Thoreau provided an example of how a person could survive over a few, using that by judging society’s restrictions and rebelling against government policies he refused to obey. Through this, and with an experience narrated in detail in his book "Walden", he was able to prove his saying that money is not required to buy one of the soul's needs, and that most luxuries, or so-called "amenities" in life, are not only unnecessary, but are considered a means of obstruction The human race was elevated.
| Henry David Thoreau (social media) |
Subsequently, in the 1960s, the Cuban poet Dulce Maria Leonaz joined a revolutionary in the path of isolation, and immediately after the Cuban revolution led by Fidel Castro in 1959, and her accusation (4) of supporting the ousted regime led by Fulgencio Batista, Leonaz would decide to stay in her home in the capital Havana without To leave him only a few times, and after many of her books were confiscated by the new revolutionary regime, the world will forget Leonas in her isolation for more than three decades before she was declared the Cervantes Prize for Spanish Literature in 1992 when she is in her nineties. Just as Thoreau's work produced by isolation inspired world leaders and influences, led by Mahatma Gandhi, the works of Lyonaz and its isolation will be inspired by artists and writers such as novelist Jaime Attenberg to write (5) "All of this can be yours" which I have refined - as you say - poems Lyonas established to understand unity and isolation And the difference between them.
Returning from death
Some choose isolation to meditate or to support his principles or compelled, but some choose to rest after a long way from seeing and experiencing suffering, and in Don McCaulin's case the latter was the closest to his condition. The British photographer, who began his journalistic career since the early fifties, by photographing the unemployed, the poor and gang members in British society, has subsequently specialized in depicting the war; moving from the American invasion of Vietnam to the civil war in Cambodia, and through wars and conflicts in Chad, Uganda, Iran, Afghanistan and Lebanon, And to another long list, and for several decades McCain worked to transfer the horrors of war to the world with his camera.
This was until the early nineties (6), when McCollen set out to photograph nature and live there, away from wars. At the end of the same decade, in Brazil this time, international photographer Sebastiao Salgado was preparing (7) with his wife to set up a "Terra Institute" on the farm land that Salgado inherited from his family, which he dedicated to establishing a nature reserve and to preserve part of the Atlantic Forest that witnessed his childhood. But it was not only a matter of protecting nature, but Salgado had decided to take some time to recover from a years-long experience in depicting migrants and refugees around the world, an experience "during which he lost his faith in humanity" (8), before nature brought him back again.
This was during the years when Salgado worked with his wife to rebuild his farm in Brazil, which inspired him in the hope of the ability of the planet and human beings with him to recover from the long wars, famines, climatic crises and other problems that have occurred and occur in the world, and then made him publish in 2013 his book The photographer, Genesis, in black and white, for people displaced by wars and climatic disasters, considering it a "huge message of love" for the earth.
The shock that Salgado suffered seems to be the closest to the one Woe encountered in "Leave a Trace", although it is not clear or known what matters have become for the latter, but this does not negate the fact that the experience of isolation is sometimes motivating and inciting to creativity and complete the path of life with faith The greater the ability of humankind to recover, and the departure from the prevailing traditional pattern, and even living outside the safe net of society, may in some cases be the only remaining means of survival.