Sirāt

Sirāt (الصراط): "the path" or "the road" — a spiritual path in earthly life and a literal bridge in the afterlife. Existence. Cosmic indifference. Surrender. Where God is... Love.

"Cinema is a place for catharsis. Like the Greeks, they didn’t go to the theater to have fun. They were going to purge, to clean, to protect society from itself. I think cinema can cure the collective imaginary in that sense. We can connect with this wound that all of us have. That is a healthy thing. We have to die before dying." Oliver Laxe 

Neurosurgery

“A long time ago, I thought brain surgery was exquisite – that it represented the highest possible way of using both hand and brain, of combining art and science. I thought that brain surgeons – because they handle the brain, the miraculous basis of everything we think and feel – must be tremendously wise and understand the meaning of life. When I was younger I had simply accepted the fact that the physical matter of brains produces conscious thought and feeling. I thought the brain was something that could be explained and understood. As I have got older, I have instead come to realize that we have no idea whatsoever as to how physical matter gives rise to consciousness, thought and feeling. This simple fact has filled me with an increasing sense of wonder, but I have also become troubled by the knowledge that my brain is an ageing organ, just like the organs of the rest of my body. That my ‘I’ is ageing and that I have no way of knowing how it might have changed.[…] My understanding of neuroscience means that I am deprived of the consolation of belief in any kind of life after death and of the restoration of what I have lost as my brain shrinks with age. I know that some neurosurgeons believe in a soul and afterlife, but this seems to me to be the same cognitive dissonance as the hope the dying have that they will yet live. Nevertheless, I have come to find a certain solace in the thought that my own nature, my I – this fragile, conscious self writing these words that seems to sail so uncertainly on the surface of an unfathomable, electrochemical sea into which it sinks every night when I sleep, the product of countless millions of years of evolution – is as great a mystery as the universe itself.”

• Dr. Henry Marsh, Admissions

“Death comes for all of us. For us, for our patients: it is our fate as living, breathing, metabolizing organisms. Most lives are lived with passivity toward death -- it's something that happens to you and those around you. But Jeff and I had trained for years to actively engage with death, to grapple with it, like Jacob with the angel, and, in so doing, to confront the meaning of a life. We had assumed an onerous yoke, that of mortal responsibility. Our patients' lives and identities may be in our hands, yet death always wins. Even if you are perfect, the world isn't. The secret is to know that the deck is stacked, that you will lose, that your hands or judgment will slip, and yet still struggle to win for your patients. You can't ever reach perfection, but you can believe in an asymptote toward which you are ceaselessly striving.”

― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air 

 

Elizabeth Strout

"As the months passed by, Artie grew very weary, he was aware of this in himself. When he spoke to Evie of leaving the country, she said only, “Where would we go?” Adding, “Plus, I have clients who depend on me.” Artie could not find people who would talk to him about what was happening in the country. Carl LeBlanc said, “Let’s not go getting ourselves depressed. He just wants to destroy us, so don’t let him.” This baffled Artie. He preferred his nights out with Ken Moynihan because of the man’s kindness (and because Artie loved him), even though they never once spoke about politics. 

—

The new principal was a woman about whom Artie immediately had misgivings; she seldom smiled, except at the younger faculty. One day she walked by his classroom as he was clapping his hands and saying to the students, “Boys and girls!” He was summoned that afternoon to her office, where she said sternly, “Not only is it demeaning for your students to be called boys and girls, but you are not even sure that they are all male and female. There may be students who are neither.” Artie just stood there, and then he said, “You’re right.” “You bet I’m right,” she said.

—

And so over time Artie no longer taught with the enthusiasm he’d had for many years; he was assigning Confederate soldiers now, and he did not even really care. He did not go to the soccer games anymore. He now had students who were using ChatGPT to do their assignments. They simply typed in a prompt and out came a paper. He thought it was worse than plagiarism, in a way. The new principal was in favor of using AI, she held a seminar on how helpful it could be in teaching. 

And then one day as he pulled into his parking space at the school, Artie turned off the ignition and he sat there; the car made a few final small pinging sounds. He was flooded with a great understanding: He was not fully himself any longer. He could not have described this to anyone, and he could not describe it to himself, but his mind seemed to be increasingly separated from the world: His mind was here, and the world was there. He was on a downward-sloping path, and no matter how hard he would try, he understood that day as he sat in his car that something was going to happen to him and he would not be able to prevent it. 

Almost, a sense of peace arrived with this. 

It went through his mind faintly: I will not have the free will to prevent whatever is going to happen to me. And his memory of what seemed to him previously to have been a vigorous wonderment at the concept of free will made him smile just slightly now. He left his car and went inside. Going to my fate, he thought. Just going to my fate, that’s all I can do."

- Elizabeth Strout, The Things We Never Say 

The end.

 https://www.joinobit.com//obituaries/8644-heavenly-alpha-centauri-windsor-mountbatten-1958_07_22-2026_04_25

27 April 2026.

Mama is gone. I searched for her yesterday, in the all-absorbing white light, this version of heaven I’ve always envisioned. I imagined some part of her would remain here, remnants found in bird song and breeze. But at night, as I lay in bed, imagining her essence crossing into eternity, forcing illusory fuchsia optics to decorate the darkness, as much as I tried to envision her in this dream, I could not erase the awareness of a certain absence. 

Mama is gone. She is not here. I cannot feel her anywhere. And all that I’ve believed about the end is different now. In this version, death is final, and pragmatic, and natural.  

Her body is still at the hospital, grafts of skin and eyes and other parts aside from her organs, which are not usable anymore, are being harvested to help someone else. But her spirit—it did not stay here a moment longer. And why would it? After the life she experienced, if given the chance to escape it all, why wouldn’t she choose that release, that final freedom?

In bursts of intermittent grief and relief, I wonder what I could have done differently. I would have liked to hold her hand in her final breaths, if she wanted me there. I would have liked to eat fried chicken with her one more time, and maybe my son would be there too, and he would hear her laugh in person, and only know her as that, not the way I knew her, as someone the opposite of laughter. I grieve the person and the dream. 

I’m arranging her disposition alone. My sister wants no part of it. She has built a fortress of boundaries around her that hardly anyone can penetrate. And my Dad has yet to learn of his ex-wife’s passing. Likely, the reality will frighten him, will shake the ideas he has about his own vitality and mortality. But when I receive the ashes and am holding Mama’s remains, I wonder if I will still feel this absence. Will a hint of her spirit still be there, one I can usher into the great mysteriousness, or will it just be a vessel filled with the dust of bone?

Hamnet

Directed, Edited, Co-written, and Co-produced by Chloé Zhao
Adapted from the novel by Maggie O’Farrell
Starring Jessie Buckley and Jacobi Jupe

*

Existence. Mother. The natural world. Sacrifices made for Love. How differently grief is experienced. The inevitable suffering and joy of the human condition. The dichotomy of life. To dream, to be, to live, to create, to hurt, to heal, to die, to be reborn, to live again... 

At its heart, Hamnet is a deeply emotive exploration of the enduring question: to be or not to be.

To be, or not to be, that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles
And by opposing end them. To die—to sleep,
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to
[…] 
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause—there's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life.

The Perfect Neighbor

Rest in Peace Ajike "AJ" Shantrell Owens

A novel form of documentary filmmaking. “The tragedy plays like a grim miniature of American life, shaped by fear, suspicion, and easy access to violence.” Jessica Winter, The New Yorker 

The Alabama Solution

Directed by Andrew Jarecki & Charlotte Kaufman
Featuring: Raoul Poole, Robert Earl Council, Melvin Ray, Sandy Ray...

The prison system in Alabama functions as a prison industrial complex, using taxpayer money to build and maintain a network of facilities that perpetuate involuntary labor, inhumane conditions, and systemic abuse. Parole denials and punitive retaliation ensure continued exploitation, while deaths and violence occur with minimal oversight. This system fosters black-market economies within prisons, contributes to the ongoing drug crisis, and continues to expand beyond state lines with the rapid expansion of ICE. Its corruption is rooted in entrenched racism and prioritizing profit and institutional growth over human life, safety, and rehabilitation.

The Apprentice

A portrait of moral erosion that extends beyond individual corruption into the system itself, showing how the relentless pursuit of power can ultimately dismantle the foundations of democracy. A horror story that reflects the American tragedy unfolding before our eyes.

Weapons

 written & directed by Zach Cregger

A classroom absent of students. How haunting an intrusion can be. In its allegory, the film carries real-world weight, invoking the terror of destructive forces invading spaces meant to be safe. It's a wild ride and a cautionary meditation on guarding our children and our homes, both physically and spiritually.