Monday, August 31, 2009

Gifts, Identity, & Bonds

Sometimes I like to wander around offering this or that little item, usually food, to friends and acquaintances. A friend described this behavior as gift-giving affection, or sometimes known as charity--occasionally thought of as a virtue. Gift giving, particularly with food, is a fairly common form of affectionate expression and a rather potent one, especially between intimates (see this NYT article). Two things come to mind: first, food has a particular place in our psychology; and second, gift-giving is an obvious external behavior that is significantly expressive of one's unseen identity. I plan on shortly giving a house-warming gift to some friends of mine, but because of events that I do not entirely understand, I will provide them in absentia. I am struck with some discontinuities about giving without presence.

In many ways, giving something is about acknowledgement. When I, say, gave some comic books to Miss Anna Tibstra at the Garlic Festival a few weeks ago, it was in part a means of saying, "Hey Anna, you are in important to me, so important that I got you these comic books." In another way it is about self-acknowledgement; "Hey Anna, look at these cool comic books that I have! Do you want them as a gift because right now I have them." The latter suggests some of the depth a gift can have pertaining to the person. This past year, Anna purchased a few successive comic books, read them, and was then so excited about them that she leant them to me despite her intention of giving one, then the second, and finally the third because she so wanted to talk about them with me. These gifts highlight a bond between Anna and I, as if we both were to say, "We like comic books together and enjoy these characters, stories, and artwork; but we can do that together! How great is that!"

Giving food, though, has a different sort of character. Suppose I work for three hours, earn about twenty-four dollars, buy a comic book, and give it to Anna. How is this different from spending three hours preparing bread for Anna or when I made the crust (and much of the pizza) for Linnea, Lydia, Kristin, and Beka when I was in Minneapolis? (Coincidentally, the house-warming gift is food.) Well, I think of what Marx has to say about labor alienation, which I cannot quote or likely describe particularly well, but here it goes: Using my wages from work to purchase a gift is about practising a skill and receiving payment rather than the goods of that labor and is therefore disconnected from me (the gift-giver); whereas when I use my skills to produce a good to be given as a gift, that good is very much nearer to me than an identical gift purchased with wages. I once purchased a book of Shakespeare's sonnets for my first girlfriend, Whitney; I also happened to write a few--significantly worse--poems for her--though I like to think they weren't altogether sappy. In one act, the gift is expressive (the purchased gift), while the other act manifests.

I favor baking and other cooking. Perhaps I could tie it to the historical reality of food production and preparation, or its nutritional utility, or communal nature, but no matter the pseudo-universal reality of such ideas, making food and giving it as a gift is personally powerful. Food, even amongst strangers and between relational rifts, has powerful symbolic and rejuvenating qualities. In A Home at the End of the World, following a traumatic event (of which the film is full) early on, the mother of one character is up late in the kitchen making pie crust. Colin Farrell's character asks why, and she says something like, "It is good to one simple, useful thing." Food has a simplicity to it, a culturally atomic reality bound up inside. It may be that such notions are not as universal as I like to think, but they show up everywhere in our media. Morning news shows are littered with hosts testing their skills with professional chefs, other shows focus on a host inviting the audience into his/her kitchen, and what about the intimacy of a homemade meal over candlelight for two?

Another film, Stranger than Fiction, uses food's qualities deftly to highlight and explain the sentiments and divisions amongst the protagonist (Will Ferrell, I have no bias toward the last name) and the love interest (Maggie Gyllenhaal). After an exhausting day of old tax forms and receipts, Harold comes downstairs to Ana's bakery where she offers him fresh cookies, which he fails to except because of occupational obligations, a blunder he understands after he has offered to pay for them. later, she prepares dinner for Lthe two of them and the scene acts as a salve to the previous wound between them. (I might add that I adore Stranger than Fiction and my friends sometimes tease me for similarities they perceive between Maggie Gyllenhaal's character and myself.)

Without presence, though, any attempt at intimacy, at building bonds between people (whether broken or newly forming) is stilted, awkward, and frustrated. The dinner made for a loved one left in the oven to warm is heartfelt, but sad, disconnected from the affectionate intention; or the ever-present dinner out when someone doesn't show up or disappears between the salad and the main course; or an even the psychological weight of an empty or moldy fridge; each of these suggests decay or distance, the failure of connection rather than the richness of new bonds founded, old bonds maintained. Often, it can at best suggest the yearning for bridging what has been riven, about healing what is wounded. Bonds require multiple parties, but the gift in absence is one party, reaching out with something that--one hopes--cannot be easily wasted.

Thursday, August 27, 2009

Annotated

"The concept of country, homeland, dwelling place becomes simplfied as 'the environment'--that is, what surrounds us. Once we see our place, our part of the world, as surrounding us, we have already made a profound division between it and ourselves. We have given up the understanding--dropped it out of our language and so out of our thought--that we and our country create one another, depend on one anoutther, are literally part of one another; that our land passes in and out of our bodies just as our bodies pass in and out out of our land; that as we and our land ar part of one another, so all who are living as neighbors here, human and plant and animal, are part of one another, and so cannot possilby flourish alone; that, therefore, our culture must be our response to our place, our culture and our place are images of each other and inseparable rom each other, and so neither can be better than the other."

--Wendell Berry, from The Unsettling of America

It was here that I had to pull out the mechanical pencil and start taking notes. I have read Berry in the past, but here--more obviously and beautifully than before--he ties together so many of my thoughts and understandings of the world. He cleanly weaves notions of character ethics, ecological insight, community association and connectivity, political action, and personhood together in admirable and delightful ways. If it weren't for the glass of wine and that whole four hours of sleep last night, I like to think I would have sat down and read half of it before dinner; but alas, my circadian rhythm and the evening warmth had other plans in mind.

In other news, my breathing and concentration have greatly improved because of walks and focused breathing. I feel a much greater sense of peace and contemplation about what's going on around me, even at work--though it is less obvious at five or six in the morning. I looked at the faces of drivers as I walked from the supermarket parking lot munching on a sweet red bell pepper. This afternoon and evening have been simply beautiful and I wondered why so few people were out on bicycles or walking. I watched people fill up their gas tanks and then distracted myself with the musical chirping of insects in a vacant lot with a drainage ditch. At first, I didn't know what attracted me to stop and attend to the space: I looked around, seeing the familiar emptiness of unused suburban spaces, but after glancing back to the service station, I noticed the rich sounds around me. I finished my pepper and then examined the grasses and insects, then wondered at how I looked, striding through the tall grass parallel the sidewalk.

At work, when Carla was making garlic butter spread for sandwiches, I noticed the happy, rapid, complex beating of the pastry paddle on the immense mixer. The bowls click-clack back and forth in their loose casing, while the paddle strikes the edges and the upraised center of the bowl; it reminded me of the beats of tin drums and I thought of recording it, then finding other rhythms in the workplace. One of my high school projects was a "found music" project, inspired by Spalding Gray's Swimming to Cambodia and something I have since forgotten. I incidentally gave the piece a loose beat with my steps, which then overlapped with the current of the ravine by the school; a little girl spoke and the family dog barked mildly, and I found--or so I felt--a bit of the everyday music we often do not hear. Today has been a day of music, found and made and unexpected, which reassures me. Music surrounds us, enlivens our day, and it made itself known to me today so that I might listen for it more attentively in the future.

Wednesday, August 26, 2009

Roots and Locale

My time spent at home is time in reflection of the sort of place I hope to establish sometime in the not-too-distant future. Home is a powerful and malleable concept, but my time this past year at school was spent, in part, in building a place where friends and acquaintances felt at ease, felt sincerely welcome. Now, I spend more time wondering what I must build up and it has incorporated itself both into my thoughts and my writing. It has, somewhat unfortunately, resulted in some tension amongst loved ones.

Last night, Miss Kalisa and I watched Fear(s) of the Dark, a series of short, animated horror films. The production was originally released in French, and we watched it subtitled. In it, one character protagonist was Asian, I believe Vietnamese since he was nationally French (or so I supposed from the other characters). His parents were mentioned but never shown. Another character was nationally English, but her parents had moved back to Japan where the story takes place. (This story was also spoken in French, which was at first odd considering the obvious rural Japan setting.) Two of the films--one showed snippets throughout while the other magnificently closed the ensemble--were almost completely voiceless and definitely language-less: the first appeared to be colonial in period and perhaps English or French, though most of the characters were socially outcast due to class or race; the latter revolved around a sturdy man I thought of as Germanic or Russian, who only spoke out in "Hey!" at one point in the film in an attempt to get help.

With the first film (the young, likely Vietnamese student), I began to consider the richness of his lineage's travels, including the character represented on my television screen with subtitles. For centuries, his family line shared a community of similar appearing, similar speaking (both in language and dialect), and culturally linked individuals. When his ancestors travelled, they might be identified by facial features, pronunciation, specific religious symbols and other cultural artifacts, and the direction from which he came. Now, the descendants of immigrants, who adopted a different language, whose children adopted a local accent, and were immersed in different culture(s) and ethnicities have undergone a profound mutation in inherited characteristics. Professor George Georgacarakos once commented that before the popular adoption of deodorants and scented toiletries, people could generally identify one another by smell--a skill we have since lost. Some television show on sexuality once suggested that we (or at least women) remain unconsciously skilled at identifying pheromones from genetically complimentary individuals from genetically similar; that is, we are more attracted to the olfactory qualities of people who would lend a greater range of genetic traits to our progeny that those who would homogenize the next generation's genes.

I might say that we have allowed our traditional roots to atrophy or have cut ourselves off from them entirely and are only continuing the process. The Midwest accent is spread nationwide via newscasters and weather forecasters, while we race to preserve and encourage traditional musical styles the world over as MTV broadcasts globally. American in particular, but humanity generally speaking is more mobile and less regionally bound. In Brazil, my friends and I were confounded trying to explain that someone was American but German descent, or English descent, or Norwegian. This is a new difficulty of language, new in the sense that it is increasingly common to have people work and live hundreds of miles from where their families lived or may continue to live--such as when Mexican laborers work in the United States while their families receive money and letters, or the border hopping husbands throughout the Middle East, or--the rather more long-lived--practice of prostitution and trafficking in persons to foreign lands for sex work.

The disconnections of person from heritage abound these days, in positive and negative guises, but I am reminded of an interviewee in Breaking Open the Head and the subsequent discussion on the legitimacy of American shamanism because the American people are so thoroughly divorced from the importance of regionality. Our families move, children move out for education and work, our food generally travels from other countries or half-way across the continent, music and style are imported from cultural centers in and outside of the country, an aesthetic for foreign film or exotic tastes suggests refinement, and so on. Meanwhile, we miss out on the traditions of conversation, storytelling, music making and practice, and even working locally with and for neighbors and friends are out of practice. This latter statement may be too strong or ill-informed, but I want to stress its encouragement all the more. I mean to say that we ought to nurture the our places--home, community, school, work, and so on--in order to preserve and cultivate the richness and identifiability by which they were once characterized. I think of my time in high school attending local music performances and my friends' art shows; those are the sorts of events that ring out, that ring with the exciting and convoluted sound of locality.



*** I realized partway in that this sort of thinking is very much in tune with Josiah Royce's writing on provincialism, a term often considered pejorative but used to encourage pride and cultivation of locality in order to build strength and richness in the larger structures of community. Mahatma Gandhi also writes about the strength of the nation deriving from the strength of villages, their economies, and the character of their population. Wendell Berry has something to say about bringing our thinking on economy and culture, health and happiness back to the small scale of rural communities, as well.

Wednesday, August 12, 2009

Secrets & Lies

"Do I have spinach in my teeth?" I asked, grinning absurdly, artificially.
"Yes, you do."
"I figured, I could see it in your face. I can read you like the back of my hand."
"No you can't."

She said it to me in a tone of someone desperately hoping to keep something a secret when in actuality, she has already felt the knowledge slip out. Secrets are dangerous and usually poorly kept. Certainly, we might keep the specific date of a certain tryst or that I ate a second piece of cake the night before confidential, but the feeling of deceit or self-loathing (or, conversely, self-satisfaction) is worn all over ourselves. I once told Miss Mary Depuydt that a tree at Gustavus was unhappy, which I then explained by describing its position between the sidewalk where it likely lacked proper saturation and was depleting its soil quality. It spoke to me, in early winter, in the quiet, slow, and contextual tongue of trees, one I managed to decipher on that evening walk.

People speak openly, too, even in the midst of keeping secrets or telling lies. My friend in this case supposed that she was not openly communicating some of the secrets she keeps even in the tone and concise diction. I do not know the dates or other attendees of events, but with our previous knowledge of one another, I am able to extricate various feelings, motives, and notions. Sometimes, when I realize that I am reading someone and share my knowledge with them, it is frightening; mostly it is awkwardly humorous. When I met Miss Bri Otis in our junior year at Gustavus, we conversed for an hour and a half, and then I reflected to her my insights and intuitions about her. I later heard from Miss Leigh Clanton that Bri returned home saying, "So, I met Caleb today," annunciating and emphasizing just so to Leigh such that she (and later I) burst out laughing. Bri has the ability to communicate astoundingly well, but generally people are attempting to communicate all of the time what they are thinking and feeling, which often includes what they want to avoid thinking and feeling if not, even more so, what they want others to avoid thinking and feeling.

When one is open to the unique languages we each use to express ourselves--each is rich in contextual nuance and idiosyncrasies--then real communication happens. Reading and writing ourselves and one another is a profound skill I have come to practice at times, times which are both illuminating and frightening in their vividness. I often strain for the accurate term or clearest metaphor for describing my sentimental or theoretical position, but that strain itself is part of routing the path to that position for another to visit, dwell in, and explore the vantage thereof. Strangely, I have witnessed powerful moments of clairvoyance in which I know a position and character of certain persons or events to come, with the acknowledgement that such a future is the result of the dependent arising of variables known and unknown, a future by no means guaranteed but, potentially, hoped for. This too is the result of reading what has been laid out; not necessarily the stars in the sky or the phase of the moon, but what these divine or universal notions might represent: the powerful celestial, physical, gravitational, radiating objects in our personal universes that govern the development of our lives.

When one keeps secrets, one must succeed at keeping secrets from oneself in order to keep them acutely away from others. This writing has come to encompass more than I had intended, but I wish to draw in its parts in closing. In a full-fledged attempt to keep not only the secret itself confidential, but the possibility of a secret unknown, the keeper of that knowledge must store it and forget it, allow it to gain dust in a hidden corner of one's mind. These secrets, like the old genealogies of powerful families or the unchecked gestations of diseases, often gain power through secrecy and can supplant the keeper; one becomes consumed by the effort of forgetfulness, the labor of undoing knowledge. Government secrecy--when portrayed well in fiction--is that which has been swept under the rug by the once powerful such that the present rulers are unaware; this is, in effect, what must be done to maintain secrets, but it is also the breeding ground for myths and deceit. I attempt to live without secrets, but recognize readily the importance of realms of knowledge, interpersonal consideration, and discretion; I will deny you knowledge but acknowledge that I am doing so to your face if it is inappropriate to expose the truth to you. This, I think of as honesty and with it, I like to think, I am able to see and read all the more clearly.

Tuesday, August 11, 2009

An Apology of Fantasy

My mother, brother, new sister-in-law and I just finished watching Coraline and I have a little to say. I have seen the film three times now, for my company, it was all their first. Presently, I am struck with the role of fantasy in narrative and the particular creators thereof who are identified at doing it well. Once, in high school, I attempted to haphazardly defend fantasy and its sibling, science and speculative fiction as a legitimate style and/or setting for meaningful storytelling. Then, as I may now, I believe I failed at the task. Here, though, I am not interested in apologizing so much as providing an apology--i.e. an argument--for the role of fantasy.

Film and theatre have been the media most successful in portraying the fantastic to wider audiences. Though some of the best fantastic works remain undisturbed in their literary formats, they do not reach the breadth that film and theatre tend to incorporate. Filmmakers and writers such as Tim Burton, Neil Gaiman, Guillermo Del Toro, Hayao Miyazaki, and Terry Gilliam (among others) all make admirable contributions to fantasy films, but they all succeed in identifying the double-edge of fantasy in the majority of their works. In the works produced by Disney and others, they tend to ignore the creatures in the shadows, the monsters under the bed, the malevolent portents on the horizon, and the witches scheming off-screen. Real fantasy--and I mean that very seriously--is taken for what it is: light and dark, both deep and powerful, and often intertwined.

Coraline does embody this aesthetic and reality rather clearly. We may antagonize the Beldame as the foul witch and the monster in the closet (or, behind the wee door in the wall), but this misses the role the Coraline herself plays as the antagonist. Though she recognizes her own guilt in the plot, the audience is more likely to forgive and pass by how she has given herself over to the dreamworld created by the Beldame. The first instance or two in the dreamworld may be forgiven as indulgence, she very quickly suspects that the dreamworld has some substance to it, a substance in which she would happily indulge as she angrily taunts her mother. Her third visit--a powerful number, it usually is--is voluntary and provides the first pact that allows more power in the "real world" for the Beldame. It is by amending her own antagonism toward her parents--by unwinding the magic of the world and finding its foul, sacrificial core--that she returns properly not only to the land of the "real," but she returns her character to virtue: she has succeeded in overcoming both the evil Beldame but also the evil in herself.

Now, I wish to turn to Del Toro's El Orfanato/The Orphanage, which though generally classify as horror, it is distinctly fantastic in its archetypes and resolution. (It may be read as a psychological "thriller" of sorts, concluding in a strange internal story leading to the narrative's end; but in the context of Del Toro's other work and the kitsch of psychological thrillers in general, I find that unlikely.) The Orphanage is the story of a mother, moving into her childhood home (an orphanage) with her husband and son, only to discover that her childhood playmates have not yet left the building and are--apparently--intruding on her family. The plot moves most dramatically when she plays a game, a game her son discovered, where one finds an object and then uses that object as a clue to find the following object until one discovers the original, missing object. In its conclusion, one might leave dissatisfied and sad; to say the least, it includes a shot of a grave and the abandonment of the orphanage. Preceding this scene is a playing out of the game and a surreal reunification, followed by a second reunification that, though obviously fantastic and otherworldly, if taken allows for a happy, even joyous ending. We can suppose a delusional woman who is haunted by loss and recollections, or we can assume a strained but clearminded woman who understands the sacrifice certain journeys require. We are left understanding that within the realms of the "real world" events transpire that are inescapable, but that underneath that, between the pages and beneath the stones, a greater space allows for painful escape and understanding.

H.P. Lovecraft discusses this in his defence of macabre fiction, stated clearly in his oft quoted opening thesis: "The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown." Though we may e able to explain more of the world than ever before, we are left in awe of ever-increasing depths of uncertainty and unknowability. Even when we know things clearly, as Lovecraft notes, mystery clings to the world around it; and that is often where we find our most terrible fantasies: in the familiar. For Coraline, it is in a doll given as a gift and a key with a button on it; for Laura (of The Orphanage), it is a doorknob; a character in Gilliam's 12 Monkeys finds her life unsettled by a photograph, or in Tideland, a new home brings it about; and Chihiro in Spirited Away stumbles through a gateway to an old themepark. These objects and places are not simply imaginative artifacts and places, they are portals into the familiar and the mysteries for both the characters and ourselves. A doll is a facsimile of a person, a basic simulation (highlighted in Ghost in the Shell II: Innocence); a key opens doors both known and unknown, as does a doorknob (especially one unattached, what doors may it not open?); a photograph mirrors the cinema screen and captures a moment--suddenly unattached--in time and space; new homes are a borderland between the known familiarities of family and the strangeness of the unexplored, of open frontiers; and what else reveals and capitalizes on our attachment to fantasy if not a theme park? (Not to mention the fear of the personifications of clowns, cartoons, or holiday personae within these fantastic locales? I myself was deathly afraid of Mall Santas as a small child.)

What we easily shed from our childhood, we frequently attempt to resume as adults in the form of fantastic fictions: the lived presence of everyday fantasy, which is only made more real when its darkness and its light are revealed together. We show children the bright side because they already know the dark, they already put the pieces together laying quietly in bed or in a room with a wind whispering through it. As adults, we forget what we have been searching for (a trope in itself), only to lose it once the show is over. We can predict the plot and the twists, we know the catharsis and how it will fail to stimulate us when it is intended to; but we yearn for the sense of wonder, the religious belief that the world on screen or stage isn't fiction but documentary, representative, real. Its presence and our grasping for it, for me, only affirms its actuality.

Friday, August 7, 2009

Nothing Special and A Little on Love

These days have provided me with absurd physical and psychological challenges. Today, I spent over nine hours working at Great Harvest and another four hours at Ivanna Cone. The labor of sponge and dough preparation, the early shift, moving furniture in the house, biking downtown, and so on have worn me pretty threadbare. I recall, somewhat unhappily, of my fall semester of junior year (2007) when I believed and acted as if I could fulfill all the demands put on me by force of will. Though I cannot say that I failed, I can say that I now appreciate the energy needed for such acts of devotion. At Great Harvest, stirring a thick brew of flour, honey, yeast, and water with a large wooden spoon, feeling the tension in muscles and resistance of my bones that are still unfamiliar to the work, I meditate on Sisyphus and Camus's interpretation thereof. I smile, and laugh at the work, at the feeling of drudgery and the satisfaction it can provide, I think of how every whirl of the spoon describes a boulder and hints at it rolling downhill. Food preparation and the labor of feeding others is never ending, rich in history, powerful in its embodiment, but always punctuated ambiguously; the punctuation of food is the comma, semicolon, ellipsis rather than the period.

In other news, I have been thinking on the varieties of love, the various realities and its manifestations. I think, sometimes fondly and sometimes frustratingly, of how I have loved youthfully, passionately, immaturely; but I have also come to recognize how love slumbers, mutates, fills niches, grows, and recedes in the situations that demand or precipitate such roles. I can speak only recently of the patience of love, its ability to wait and meditate independent of my own expectations or intentions; love can communicate, unspeaking, across distances; love may give perspective that I never expected to possess. Here, I speak broadly of love; the amicable, the familial, the romantic, the neighborly, and that between the newly acquainted all have their particulars, details about which I am constantly learning more. Mostly, I feel studious, meditative, and active in the deciphering the experiences relating to the waking and sleeping cycle of love, the relationship it has with distances, the role of communication, and so on. I may, sooner or later, recount some episodes that spur such reflection, but for now, good night.

Monday, August 3, 2009

Baking with Geat Harvest & Intellectual Property

As part of becoming an "insider" at Great Harvest--that is, I have access to recipes and other methods refered to as trade secrets--I had to sign over my ability to talk about them in any detail. This concerns me. What also concerns me is that I am encouraged to innovate within the bounds of my new job (I am not sure where the time for that is going to come from), but any innovations become further inside information that I cannot take with me outside of Great Harvest. What does that mean? Well, even if I make some delicious new bread, I can't bake it anywhere but at Great Harvest. In other words, I don't even "own" my own recipes if I make them at work. Ouch.

How do I feel about this? It seems counterintuitive to simultaneously support creativity and innovation (things I wrote my thesis on) while suppressing the ability to use that knowledge beyond such limited bounds as a single company. Now, I do understand that recipes and other "trade secrets" (a term I find somewhat disconcerting) is tricky stuff. Given one serious leak of information, any other company may begin to sell similar products and gain a major foothold. Then again, that sort of impetus places all the more importance on innovation and one-upmanship between businesses--though such competition is unfair when businesses have vastly different sizes and resource bases. What I come to, though, is that this policy of claiming employees' recipes and work styles retards the potential for innovation. I would be perfectly willing to share and develop new recipes with Great Harvest (for example, I made a dry dough of Dakota on accident which I think would have made great crackers; in the end, the loaves still tasted pretty good), but I am reluctant to work within such confines.

I am anxiously, but happily employed. The schedule baking demands is exciting and orienting for me. I wish that I had some more time for yoga or tai chi in the morning, and my body is figuring out what stirring a dozen pounds of dough with a wooden paddle means, but overall this has been really fantastic. I work, and by midday, I have performed admirably. For some reason, I have had difficulty Friday and today, but tomorrow is another day, and with quality sleep and more focus, I can get it together again.

...

Also, Miss Emily Kuenker and Miss Gretchen Gardebring called me the other day, for which I was very thankful.