Sailing peaceful through the tide of war....

I haven’t dared read the news today.

I don’t want to.

I’m on a boat travelling from Finland to Stockholm past the archipelagos of the Baltic Sea.

Out on deck, everything is so beautiful in the winter sunshine. Far too beautiful to sully it with news of the catastrophic criminal stupidity of the Russian invasion.

Inside is not so good. The boat is like a surreal combination of floating hotel, bar, restaurant and duty free store.

“I will go down with this ship…”

That’s Dido. Singing in my head. I rather wish she wouldn’t.

Because social collapse, ecological disaster, the insanity of war… They’re all there, lurking like dark shadows at the back of my mind.

And what should I do? How should I be responding? Where does my duty lie?

In Helsinki on Thursday I ran a writers’ workshop about empathy and I guess that is a start.

Because empathy is at the heart of theatre and I have this obstinate belief in the power of theatre to promote empathy between people and so to strengthen our common humanity.

And I think that is both a necessary and a political act.

A participant says she has family in Ukraine and is in pieces.

Another says he can’t stop thinking about the fact that the last time the Russians invaded Finland it did so under such similar pretexts and why is it that as humans we never seem to learn.

And as we work together trains are arriving in Helsinki full of frightened Russian people fleeing their unhappy country.

And I cannot understand why it is that we are capable of such hellish ingenuity as to use the oxygen from the surrounding air to create a deadlier explosion in a thermobaric weapon and yet we can also be so stupid as to never learn from our historical mistakes.

Or how it can be possible for someone to be a ruthlessly intelligent as Putin and yet at the same time blunder into such an intensely stupid and self destructive a mistake.

Someone in the workshop asks: is it right to give aggressors a voice?

And I ask myself would it be right, would it even be possible, to write empathetically about such a man?

After all, if my concern is to help create a world in which everyone’s humanity is respected, must that not also include the likes of him?

How would I portray him?

I guess I would want to say how much he is afraid.

His father fought in the so-called destruction battalions in the Ukraine in the second world war. These battalions committed atrocities as they pursued a scorched earth policy and carried out the ruthless extermination of anyone accused of treachery.

These experiences must have left him traumatised and brutalised: and I would imagine him abusing his young son as a result.

They say of Putin that he was very small as a boy growing up in a tough district of Leningrad and that he had to be brutally aggressive to survive.

I would imagine him being tortured when he joined the KGB. Because that is how we train people to become torturers…

It makes me feel sick to enter his world. To enter the bombed out desolation of his inner landscape…

This is not to justify or excuse his actions.

But to humanise him in our imaginations also makes him vulnerable. It might even help him know how to defeat him.

It also stops us dehumanising ourselves.

And perhaps as we imagine him spreading his trauma, his fear and his rage throughout the country and the world it will reming us writers not to do the same in the creations of our imagination.

Perhaps I would try to make him a figure of tragedy: so that we weep for who he is, what has been done to him, and what he has done to the world.

Because weeping, too, asserts our humanity.

I was concerned to do this years ago (in 1989) in my INES DE CASTRO - which is also about a large state brutally invading its smaller neighbour.

Ines has been told her children have been killed. She asks her murderer if has no feeling.

He replies he feels very well.

And then he tells his story:

“I once knew a boy. His home was taken in a border raid. It was an insignificant affair. No-one remembers it now.

The spaniards came at night. They whipped him and they stabbed him and they left him for dead.

But he lived. He saw.

They found his mother. They tied her to the table and they raped her. They raped her again and again. When they were tired they used their knives.

They found his baby sister and they tossed her in the air. They tried to catch her on their blades.

And this boy I know of saw it all. He screams inside my mind.

There is nothing worse than being powerless. As you now know.

You have an hour. Arrangements must be made. I recommend you see a priest.”

I don’t know what screams inside Putin’s mind. Or why or how.

Something terrible for sure.

But I will not let him scream in mine.

Beautiful, peaceful islands pass me as I write.

And I will remember this. I refuse to forget:

The utter, astonishing and miraculous beauty of the world.