Voices from Ravensbruck.

Pat Binder's art project is a memorial to those 132,000 women in Ravensbruck, Germany's largest concentration camp. Arranged as if the viewer were opening a door inside the camp to each different category, a select few of the 1200 poems are revealed. Hope, death, everyday life, work, suffering and resistance characterize some of the themes of the poetry. They are positively bone chilling. More so, the talent and beauty emanating from this work is incredibly moving. Pat Binder celebrates the creativity and the limited self expression the women had in the camp, and shows it to the world via this electronic medium. Her use of hypertext doesn't take anything away from the feeling in the poetry.

When I click the "longing" door, a pink rose with thorns and new shoots appears and when I click the new shoots, there is a poem from an unknown French woman. It is the following:

"No doubt you poeticize me from afar,

see me ever in the bloom of spring,

you do not yet know, my dearest, that I now

am greying at the temples"

If I could ever write with such simplicity and beauty I would try to pay homage to this masterful collection of creativity.

On that note, I retract my statement that I don't think the internet is conducive to earth shattering poetry - Pat Binder has single-handedly changed my mind. One doesn't need to read all the poems on this website, or even open all the doors to understand what she is doing - giving these women's voices back to them to provide a chance to leave a legacy, share their spiritual solace, and inspire other women, writers, navigators of the internet. And she does it with considerable success.

By way of conclusion to this post, and this blog, I want to express my humble appreciation of the colossal concept that is narrative in a digital age. I'm a single cell in an entire organism of technology and power, to be sure, but now I'm a little more educated on that organism. I hope my posts have portrayed a glimpse of hope, because I do have hope that journalism and poetry and art can thrive in a world of data. As I gain confidence in my writing and critical abilities, I have increasing faith in that of others, as well. As I have stated before, as long as there is Grimaldi's pizza, there will be Amore. Similarly, as long as there are experiences to be had, there will be art. The medium of the day might by a stone tablet, a quill, a blog, or a hypertext, these matters of media are trivial, and not to be discriminated against. The hater bites the dust. The hater gets left behind, and some people might be alright with that, but not me. I'm up for the wave of technology that the future has in store for us along with all its resources for art, because I love humanity and its creations and I can't wait to get in it.