May 18, 2024
Margot, Brooklyn
Featuring:
Greer Gibney
Jenny Johnson
Adrienne Raphel
An image of courage that stands out to me lately is students across the country standing up against Israel’s decimation of Palestinians, only to be met with state suppression. These stories of protest, in addition to those of people offering their life as protest, call into question: what does it mean to use your body as a vessel for something greater than you, and how do we use it courageously?
In a still from Rosemary’s Baby, the cover of the magazine, as it was in the film, reads Is God Dead? I think faith, in many cases, is made wrongly synonymous with courage. Here, Rosemary finds herself alone, in danger, and knowing as much only by the language of her own nervous system. Signs. Symbols. Hunches. Our intuition: the voice we sometimes drown out and label unable to care for us, if in opposition to our identity. Courage is to counter: what is my body telling me I can no longer ignore? She’s not in possession of her own body, or others want to use it for their benefit. The baby is a metaphor for that.
When I was born, my sounds tortured my mother. I grew up to breathe silently. Sounds now torture me. It takes courage to listen to the sounds of your body. They’re telling you something. They’re screaming just as loud as the thoughts in your head, the outside voices, the sounds of the house, the walls, the floors. Something big in me is sad to have been silenced.
Courage is to come into this world both in form and spirit. The one who births and the one who is born. Rosemary’s Baby is a kind of hero’s journey. She learns how to listen to her intuitive voice in a world where we often let others do the hard thing and fail to do it ourselves. It’s heroic to piece together your most intimate clues that something is wrong, to sacrifice life as you know it, or even life itself, in honor of your deepest truths.
When called to courage, what part of you responds? How do we make that part the hero? How do we focus on what’s screaming in us, crouched in a corner somewhere in our body, among all the noise?