Tuesday, December 11, 2012

Reflections on my birthday

I looked in the mirror and saw myself. I'm not sure of what I was looking for, but there I was looking back. I have, from time to time, been struck by an ability to see in a person that which will be. I'm not talking clairvoyance or premonition. Rather, there is that which will be that is evident in the that which is. Perhaps that has gone by other names in the past. I wanted to see, even in my less than ideal state, some image of what is coming that is not here already.

I remember Brita being "oh so excited" to watch Freaky Friday in which the teenaged protagonist gets to experience herself in fifteen or so years. At the end of the viewing--enjoyable if a little sillier than expected--she had a sort of anger and anxiety about it all. Brita was envious, or so I recall, of the protagonist getting to see one of the options laid out in front of her. I haven't spoken with Brita in some time, though she may follow the blog. I wonder now if she would want to see that person. I don't know. I mean, in many ways I wish I might tell a younger Caleb that all the anxieties of being young--girls/women (depending on the age), basic work, family, a sense of home--would be resolved. How many would be then kept guarded from that juvenile self?

The mirror showed myself: a wide face, a few gray hairs, slightly blood shot eyes, lips marred by wine. Nevertheless, there were no indicators of where this person might be going. I cannot see what I sometimes see in others: a potential placement in the world with clear attributes and directions. While I might calm the Caleb of ten years previous, I don't think I could calm the Caleb of only five years previous. He and I still share far too many misgivings about the world, about where he/I might be happy working, about he/I might be happy living, or with whom he/I might be living. It isn't an absence of possibility; rather, it is the overabundance of possibilities.

Tonight... Today, I get to enjoy the company of a dear friend, see a young woman I am infatuated with, enjoy the company of more than a dozen friends, play a game I get to throw myself into... And yet I am laden with ambiguities and delays that recall senior year more than hint at being a senior. I can spend ninety minutes discussing virtue, genius, direction, craft and so on, but that doesn't lay out what I might be doing in five, ten, twenty years any better than I could when u entered college (let alone high school).

Allow me to say that I am happy. I have divested myself of some emotional and academic weights, even tried to mend those gaps left behind. There are those hurdles--thesis work, roommate politics, work schedule, family responsibilities--still requiring my attention, though each provides its own lesson and potential boon. I am happy and maybe even a little relaxed compared to years before. What remains is the frustration of direction: while I may be able to find work once I complete my thesis, does it direct me any better than when I completed my undergraduate work? Am I any better situated?

I would not trade this deliberation and difficulty for anyone else's. There are those close to me struggling with their own crises that I do not envy. And then there are those that are years my senior dealing with the exact same. Where I am is my place, and I could be younger or older but still be here. I don't want to be excited for another board game or its expansion next year. I want to be excited to enter another stage of my life: a career I can delve into, a relationship with certainty and devotion (that is not said to undermine, but to outline where I am now), a place I might grow roots, or a home in which I might invest. At this point, none of these are clear and for that reason I am existentially concerned.

Are these strictly cultural concerns? Do the lifestyles of my parents and siblings construct illegitimate rules? Am I just aspiring for some status quo? Is the expansion of my film library as legitimate as the birth of the first daughter in my family since my sister less legitimate? (The last is clearly a jest, though I raise it for hyperbolic and playful, though not solely absurd reasons.) I am posed at the still young age of twenty-six with, What do I want out of my life? And secondly, though just as importantly, How can I achieve it?

Monday, September 3, 2012

Poem: "Hub, Stems, Circles" or "From Iron to Tomatoes"

Iron arteries & steel cells trace
through the nation. Ley lines of artifice
& industry, loads of coal, aluminum, timber;
the burden of utilitarian titans visecting town,
city, neighborhood; bifurcations of old choices
cemented, leaden, and transgenerational.

Every six minutes a train passes through town,
the equivalent & consistency of light piercing
the emptiness of the sun to earth; a fractal
equation of heavy, breathing life combusting
hydrocarbons, ancient but refreshed,
made new with the labors of the living.

Wheels cut through my transit, my day, my
circuitousroutes along their own stems
leading toward--and out from--some inexorable
hub, through which my late Apalachian
childhood nights return to me, that body
laying unsleeping in an old wood house swept
off by floodwaters but still remaining
rooted there & in memory--made firmer by
its rattling constitutoinal forbears, the
lives lost in timber & stone but resurrected,
like memories thundering in on the steely clouds.

In my daytime dreaming I discern not the
architect but the architecture, the texture
of that revolutionary movement, the vast arch
marked by breaths, heartbeats, sleepless nights,
the smiles & caresses of lovers, the doubleshifts
& empty bottles & freshly cleaned kitchen counters
awaiting spills of wine & the aromatic bleeding
of late summer tomatoes.

Wednesday, June 20, 2012

Poem: Pass the basket

I have been dabbling in poetry again, and not just haiku. Here's one I cobbled together, though I admit it is still rough. It shows I have been thinking of Ginsburg and Gary Snyder lately.

...

Pass the basket
& draw on your mothy pockets
with those anesthetized hands;
the cool gift of ungiving.

What gems & fruits
might feed our musicians,
our lost poets, our hoarse sidewalk prophets?
What fuels the awoken spirits
& the half-assed Buddhas, the part-time messiahs?

Judas & Jesus are looking for a cup of coffee outside the bar;
Tanto & the Ranger have been turned away from the Shelter,
walking the streets staying warm with a bottle of Wild Turkey;
Penelope sings for her love in the coffeeshop,
& Ulysses is lost from his crew in the Ponderosa pines.

The empty basket passes for the tithe
to the unbelievers, the pagans, the uncertain übermensch.
While Clark Kent spends his off hours
scratching bad poetry for Lois
who will never read it
because she is out to dinner with an internet-inspired bad date.
And the empty basket pays the bus fare, the gas money,
most of a train ticket back home.

The kids all dream of the Village,
the basket houses full of honest child faces
& the City becomes Montreal, Paris, Austin upon waking.
Through the day they walk on stilts, wear papier mâché masks, picket for Truth--
not knowing what Truth or whose Truth,
just the word like a crisp, Braeburn apple in hand--
& they hold out hats, upturned & empty.

So we pass the basket,
not for the beer or the cuppa,
not for the gas or the tickets,
not for the falafel or dogs,
not for the hotel room or the camping permit;
yearning for full moon silver coins
& the paper to scrawl out the ghosts tucked tightly in our pens and brushes.

...

Inspired, in part, by No Direction Home; also to those with only cars, hotel rooms, and parks to sleep on or in in Flagstaff. May creativity and godliness find multifarious forms and suprising manifestations of painful beauty.

Warming isn't cheap: Wild fires, climate change, and taxes

This is in reflection based on this article: http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/06/20/501081/connecting-the-dots-how-climate-change-is-fueling-western-wildfires/

It is hot in Flagstaff these days. I'm not saying it is sweltering 90s and humid like I'm used to in the Midwest summers, or the 110s and 120s one might expect in Phoenix. I'm saying that like the rest of the West, we're experiencing global warming. 

And it isn't cheap. 

The raging wildfires in the American West are astonishing. They are the partial result of a dry winter and early loss of snow. The forests are drier than they ought to be and that great big western sky is pretty cloudless, though you may get billowing smoke in certain regions. And even when the storms do come, the parched forests are going to be less able to manage lightning strikes, flitting embers, and stray anthropogenic sparks. But what we're seeing is, in some startling ways, horribly anthropogenic. We are turning up the thermostat. 

So we're sending out courageous firefighters, recruiting more planes, and evacuating more communities in order to save lives and protect habitats. Unfortunately, we are also protecting old habits. Month after month, year after year we're seeing hotter and drier weather (in the West, while other regions like Minnesota are experiencing deluges, http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/06/20/503301/hell-and-high-water-as-record-sw-wildfires-rage-duluth-is-deluged/) that ultimately comes out of our pockets.

What do I mean? Well, those firefighters are government employees, funded through taxpayer dollars, and the necessity to pull in more planes and other equipment shows how ill-prepared this system of protection is for climate change. (This in the context of a conservative stance of shrinking government and a liberal politics that seems to stand on sand rather than soil and bedrock.) So these stopgap measures are going to hit government pocketbooks hard, and the state governments as well as the federal are seeing more moths that dollars. 

I have plenty of reasons to ride a bike rather than drive (which, I admit, has been a failing of late), to avoid petrochemical-intensive foods (commercial meat, non-regional produce, and highly processed food products), and aim for other lifestyle changes to reduce personal carbon emissions. Even on the personal and communal scales, we are going to have difficulty buffering ourselves against these radical ecological changes. For those who don't know--and I recognize that for some this is threadbare and even trite--we get the word ecology and economics from the same Greek root: eikōs, or "home." What we don't pay for now in terms of efficiency, industrial paradigmatic shift, and cultural transformation--with the final goal of a sustainable culture, politics, and biosphere--we are already being forced to afford through emergency services, amelioration, and adaptation/maladaptation. We're paying for climate change right now, not in five or ten or fifty years, but right now. 

And I want to be positive. I want to spin something exciting and beautiful and visionary out of all of this. Maybe another day. Now, I think we need to take a look at what is in front of us: short, dry winters; premature springs; dry and bipolar summers; and the perturbations of millenia-old growing seasons. I'd like to say a petition or a presidency can do it, but it demands some radical challenges to the legitimacy of the contemporary American politics, not just in rhetoric and subject, but in involvement and demands. 

Douglas Adams remarked, "I love deadlines. I love the sound they make as the go by." Well, we seem to be hearing plenty of those and they're not for publishing stories or books. We have already spent our stipends and now are running on cigarettes and coffee and ramen noodles. If we don't get to some serious work soon, I think we'll just be down to the cigarettes. Or maybe we'll stick with the ramen, instead.

Friday, June 8, 2012

Counters and Alternatives: Jokes and Wisdom

All my friends have like
ideas, half-joking; we're
elder, fools, shamans.

...

I am in a quiet, reflective place. Somewhere between Rochester, Minnesota and my departure for Flagstaff from Lincoln, Nebraska, I came down with a cold. It hushed my voice and dampened my head, but my mind is heavy with magic stories, dream places, the afterthoughts of part-time strangers. I have read through the first 100 issues of Hellblazer (many of which are reread)--the comic of working class sorcerer John Constantine--and am finally jumping into Vurt by Jeff Noon--a drug-addled British cyberpunk Manchester dreamscape. During my travels I listened to Jennifer Eagan's A Visit From the Goon Squad (on Flagstaff to Independence, Kansas) and Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao; both of which practice a multiple-perspective, sometimes schizotypal examination of an event, a person, a family, a life. I am struck with a deep appreciation for narrative histories, even of the fictionalized sort. These multi-faceted tellings, these textured explorations of experience, of reality, always seem rooted in a magic of the moment, an understanding that language is brilliant when it points to its failure to share that which is its goal.

In my mind rested but restive mind, these connections are clearer than I will make them. I am entertaining the possibility of Tarot cards. I am intrigued by them in at least two clear ways. First, the tradition of the Tarot represents a way of evaluating and taking in the world that I appreciate even in my inability to understand. Tarot, like alchemy and the I Ching and other alternative wisdom traditions, relates some sort of synchronicity, reflectivity, and/or intertwining of the self with the greater structure, being, and/or perception of the world. Though the logic--a term I use loosely and anachronistically--remains elusive and unclear, the axiom that we are in and of the world is deeply satisfying to me. If in the process of making one's experience more understandable, one also comes to appreciate the world in a novel way, even if it is only through articulating uncertainty and strangeness, then I am captivated. (Note: I am not interested in divination or predictive uses of Tarot; divination, though it has a long tradition, strikes me as a misapprehension of such practices except under specific circumstances.)

Second, Tarot provides a counter-structure to knowledge and knowing compared to the one with which I am "comfortable." The rhetoric(s) of "capitalism" and "democracy"--by which I mean very specific, politically and temporally situated concepts--are deeply troubling. Capitalism has the troubling ability to claim counter-narratives and commodify them. Democracy has been used to validate and valorize the use of violence and the appropriation of public funds for militaristic ends. Theory and practice that go beyond and counter to such stifling structures of knowing are of crucial significance. Despite that, I think it is important to consider how such work may still allow space for hegemonic politics; with that in mind, capitalism and a disempowered democracy can continue to infiltrate such important work.

What strikes me as so important here is that an empowering counter-rhetoric around identity, political economy, spiritual and applied ecology is possible through working with both of these "intrigues" simultaneously. If we are to either deepen or contradict practical, praxical economy and politics, we have the challenge of thinking beyond the boundaries with which we are comfortable. I am not interested in rehabilitating sick institutions or ameliorating their impacts, though I think that those will be intermediate outcomes of such work; rather, I am interested in fostering (also read as "planting," "tending," "preparing") replacement institutions and clearing ("opening up," "contesting," "developing") the space in which such [counter]institutions can dwell. If these are to be both powerful and relatable--something we both want and can do--then they must be rooted in a deeper relationship of the human person to the world. This human person is porous in environmental, social, psychological, intellectual, spiritual, and--in the spirit of these alternative wisdom traditions--cosmic ways. 

So why the haiku? Well, it is derived from a few text messages I sent to my friend Sam Bradley. It seems that all of my friends expect free drinks now that I work at a wine bar, though they only expect in "half-joking" ways. What does this mean? Well, I identify three roles (though there are many more, and synonymous names for these three) in which wisdom and jest are intertwined: the elder, the fool, and the shaman. The elder may chide and condescend, but offers pearls of guidance and truth that the jokes and stories may allow to stick. In oral traditions, the elder (sometimes maternal, sometimes paternal, sometimes both) is the primary individual(s) responsible for passing along stories and histories that communicate personal identity. The fool (when well articulated and not simply the ridiculous or obscene) provides a mirror through which we might see the self or society (as individual; the society: an everyman; the outcast: drunkard; the authority: royalty or the Church; and so on) in insightful ways. It is by providing a foil of the norm, appropriate, or normative that we can see the truth of who and what we are. (This is highlighted by how the fool and the shaman are sometimes analogous in certain cultures, such as some northeastern First Peoples of North America/Turtle Island, though I am not able to be more specific.) And third, though not finally, is the shaman who provides an intermediary between human, ecological, and spiritual worlds. (Note: These are definitely overlapping and co-constitutive categories for many if not most cultures; how they exist as such, though requires specific and sympathetic analysis.) The shaman demonstrates knowledge in counterintuitive ways to the cultural norm, though such practice is validated by the in-betweenness that such roles explore. Plants', animals', and places' spiritual significance may be identified through medicinal use or magical qualities. Shamans provide insight into the experiences of spirits, places, animals, and plants that support the well-being of the community even if the reasons did not fit with the understanding of the community, such as by "listening" to waterways and precipitation or--as Aldo Leopold puts it--"thinking like a mountain" to appreciate the relationship between wolves, mule-deer, and the mountains.

If I want to take these roles and insights seriously, it means stepping beyond normative behavior. It means exploring and dwelling in the in-betweenness where the shaman finds tense, dynamic, and insightful home. I think of Slavoj Zizec, whose uncouth enthusiasm and diction makes him a sort of jester in the court of political theory, in the theatre of theory, as it were. He crosses the edges of the socio-cultural norm (where trash and human waste go, the analysis of gender and perversion in film, the demarcation of imagination in the political) to show us the rather narrow limits of our society, politics, and psychology. I work hard to appreciate the wisdom that I do not understand from others, but the practice of it strikes me as absurd or nonsensical. It is important to me to break such habits and I know of no clearer way than to practice counter-habits.

...

And as an afterthought, I plan on writing for this specifically (reflections, essays, poetry, etc.) at least once a week.

Thursday, March 15, 2012

Recipe - Squash Spice Cakes

I've been meaning to post this for a few days. I hope it gets reincarnated by my classmates at the Willow Bend Environmental Education Center.

...

Squash spice cakes
Adapted from Pumpkin Whoopie Pies, http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/Pumpkin-Whoopie-Pies-369375?mbid=ipapp

Recipe makes about 2 dozen. 

3/4 c whole wheat flour
1/2 c white flour
1/4 c oats
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp cinnamon, generous
1/4 tsp cloves
1/2 tsp ginger or anise

Mix in a bowl and set aside. Preheat oven to 35oF.

1 stick butter (8 Tbs) at room temperature
1 cup brown sugar
1/4 ground flax (optional)

Blend until smooth with an electric mixer. 

15 oz puréed squash
1 tsp vanilla
1 egg

Blend together with the mixer. 

1/2 c white flour

Gradually add in flour mixture. If needed, add in white flour until desired texture. This can make a more cookie style or a more cake style depending on the added flour. When thoroughly mixed, grease cookie sheets. Use a tablespoon measure to scoop generous globs of batter onto cookie sheet, they will double in size. These will bake pretty fast, 9-13 minutes. Once slightly cooled, move to cooling rack. 

Sunday, March 4, 2012

I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon: A Paranoid Allegory

The entirety of the anthology is available in .rtf format at
. This commentary contains spoilers.

...

Philip K Dick published the short story "I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon" in 1980. The story concerns Victor Kemmings and the interstellar passenger ship which has failed to completely put him in cryonic stasis for the ten year travel to his new home. The ship's AI struggles to provide stimulation to Kemmings that will keep him from going mad. Unfortunately, as the AI tells Kemmings, "I am a simple mechanism, that's all." The AI relies on memories of Kemmings childhood and first marriage, and subsequently on wish fulfillment fantasies of what it will be like when they complete the journey and arrive at LR4-6, the colonized planet around a distant star. 

"I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon" masterfully prefigures fantastic questions of SF that appear in films such as Primer, Moon, and Solaris. Dick uses the lens of SF to tell us stories about ourselves and often about where we are headed. Philip K Dick died in 1982, four years before my birth, and just two years after publishing this story. What strikes me is his keen observation of how technology doesn't give us any distinctly new tools to encounter the world. Kemmings, laying back in his malfunctioning cryonic sleep chamber and blessed with nearly two centuries of life, is still obsessed with a few brief events from his childhood and first marriage. This excursion to a distant place is intended to be a new start, though even this new start comes with all the weighty emotional baggage he has taken into every other adventure.

I have read this before as a cautionary tale from a paranoid genius. We ought to watch our technology and watch ourselves because we shouldn't expect our "simple mechanisms" to do more than we allow them. How I presently reread it was concerning the depth with which Dick portrays the technological goal as some obscure liberation from our histories (childhood and spoiled opportunities), our physical limitations (age and travel), and psychological neuroses (the trauma of guilt, responsibility, and authenticity) which is ultimately unattainable; at least through technology alone. In fact, the abilities of the ship's AI suggest that real transformation and liberation must come through interpersonal encounters and are beleaguered by the rich complexities and wish fulfillment of technology.

When he was four, Kemmings was stung by a bee he tried to extricate from a web. He says to himself, "It was unfair. It made no sense. He was perplexed and dismayed and he felt a hatred toward small living things, because they were dumb." After an inattentive mother tells him to put Bactine on the sting, he finds his cat Dorky reaching for a bird in the garage. With his newfound disgust of small, stupid animals, he helps Dorky to the bird who snatches it and with the crunch and ruffle of a fresh kill. This precipitates an entire new wave of guilt leading to a leaden sky chiding him for his wrongdoing. Dick uses a very basic, believable, traditional narrative for a child--sticking with succinct, uncomplicated sentences--but allows these brief episodes to erode the later development of complex relationships and guiltless pleasures.

The ship's AI began the fantasies with Kemmings's first marriage with a small French woman named Martine. He reminisces of their first home but it is all overshadowed by its inevitable decay. These are the realities that stick with Kemmings. Despite a luxurious future replete with a wine cellar and 20th Century counterculture kitsch ("Fat Freddy Say's")--an allusion to a richer and more fulfilling past--Kemmings cannot but notice the way these memories are undermined, eventually leading to their frantic and terrible decay. The ship can take Kemmings's memories and provide him with a playground of childhood and youthful recollection, but it is the neurotic and anxious mind that pollutes and strips out the richness of these earlier experiences.

Even with the wish fulfillment of arriving LR4-6, his anxieties build up so much that an aching wound is treated by the hotel's robot doctor. Kemmings engages the robot doctor concerning the verisimilitude of this new world, taking a scalpel from the robot doctor--who has been as obliging as possible--and unscrews the back of the television to reveal an empty box. "'Oh dear,' the robot doctor says," now clearly channeling the ship's AI. Through various repetition of this landing fantasy, Kemmings makes it alive, if not entirely well to his new home. In the meantime, the ship has contacted Martine in order for her to meet Kemmings at LR4-6 and provide some form of recuperation or at least comfort. This is when we see the profound unraveling of Kemmings's mind:

"'There's no use turning [the TV] on,' Victor Kemmings said. He stood by the open closet, hanging up his shirts.
"'Why not?'
"Kemmings said, 'There's nothing in it.'
"Going over to the TV set, Martine turned it on. A hockey game materialized, projected out into the room, in full color, and the sound of the game assailed her ears.
"'It works fine,' she said.
[...]
"'Look at this.' He paused in his work of hanging up his clothes. 'Watch me put my hand through the wall.' He placed the palm of his right hand against the wall. 'See?'
"His hand did not go through the wall because hands do not go through walls; his hand remained pressed against the wall, unmoving.
"'And the foundation,' he said, 'is rotting away.'"

We are taken to appreciate the fear that Martine must feel being told that she is not real, that the TV is not real, that the wall is not real. Kemmings is living the virtual despite the material. His perception, once infused with the anxieties of youth, is now infused with the contamination of the virtual and imagined. The ship's AI has succeeded in keeping Kemmings in some way functional, but by resorting to cross-pollinating memories and wish fulfillment, Kemmings has conflated them all. I reflect more and more on the infiltration of the world with the hyperreal. Professor Jennifer Musial discuss how Twitter might support class questions by posting them to the classroom wall via the projector. A typed 240 character question is not a replacement for a raised hand. It is not real in the same way, even if it is real in its own way. 

Kemmings recalls the 1980s when the poster he and Martine received as a wedding gift was made. The poster is framed and preserved, a valuable antique that Martine confesses she has had to sell since the ending of their marriage. In his dream-like state, Kemmings questions the poster's authenticity. He worries that the signature of Gilbert Shelton may be forged, applied after Shelton's death. Even the certificate of authenticity could have been added after the fact to provide certainty to a fake. He and Martine default to the friend who gave it to them, an expert on late 20th century counterculture. It is a human being not some artifice that provides him some measure of reassurance. Later, not even Martine can be the direct contact Kemmings needs to bring him back to the present and the real. At the story's close, he reflects to himself, "We didn't have sense enough to take care of it. Now it's torn. And the artist is dead."

I find this story haunting not because it is grim and paranoid, as is Dick's overall style, but because it seems so prescient. Between social media and video chatting, 3-D televisions and semi-immersive media environments, we seem to be overlapping with the moment when the virtual eclipses the material. In many ways, this may already be so. Online fora and chatrooms provide reinforcing environments for like-minded zealots of one bent or another. News sources and "objective" resources (see http://xkcd.com/978/) become so intermingled, either narrowing into blind fomenting certainty or broadening into untamable absurdity, when both have become subject to the whims of 24-hour news cycles and unchecked user-generated content. Our virtual and material have entered the hyperreal in which neither attain the certainty for which both strive.

These contemporary anxieties are not because of our "simple mechanisms" run amok. At least not according to Dick. Rather, we are seeing what neurosis, paranoia, anxiety, and fear turn into when given powerful technology and neverending play. Kemmings is stung by a bee, lifts a cat to snatch a bird, and dreamily squashes a feeble fluttering alien insect. His mother's cold demeanor and his parents desire to get rid of their cat Dorky plant a seed that yields a deep taproot into his subconscious which manifests as a grim karmic ritual throughout his life. His demeanor and self-destruction, as well as his fear from a grim omnipotent sky-god, become mind-numbing and deconstruct even the infirm barriers that hold his mind together. Technology offers us both a looking glass and a magnifying lens, an MC Escher artifact constantly reflecting ourselves onto the world in myriad beautiful and horrible amalgams. Our tools do not make us wise, it is how we use what we have. As Dick's story attests, we are not men with the tools of the wise; rather, we are children stumbled into the gardens of ancients and gods.

Wednesday, February 22, 2012

Standing Strong & Looking Back

"So I had to do a lot of thinking and reappraising of my definiton of black nationalism. Can we sum up the solution to the problems confronting our people as black nationalism? [...] I still would be hard pressed to give a specific definition of the overall philosophy which I think is necessary for the liberation of black people in this country."
- Malcolm X, "Young Socialist," 1965

"These remarks... indicate that even at a mature stage of the development of his philosophical position, Malcolm did not hesitate to re-examine his ideas and consider the possibility of radical shifts in that position."
- Angela Davis, "Meditations on the Legacy of Malcolm X," 1992

Reading Davis is always a treat. What I read in this, one aspect of Davis's point, is that Malcolm X had taken on a demanding self-critique of his own political philosophy. Though I am interested in reading more on both Davis and Malcolm X, what I see here is remarkable. A political posture amongst these radicals is both strong and reflective. These are not individuals who reached firm ground and stayed there; rather, they understood the usefulness of one position without allowing that to define them. What does this mean for me?

It is important to me take theory and develop opinions, take opinions to inspire feeling, to take feeling and move that to action. This itself is a reflective process that is augmented by self-contained questions: Do they opinions "fit" or do they require further restructuring of myself? Do those opinions or feelings suggest an incomplete or inadequate theory? Does the action make sense? Does action--behavior, activism, community development, occupation--manifest in meaningful ways? What new insights surface with action? These questions lead to a reassessment of theory that then recreates the process. It is reflective and hopefully generative series of questions and answers.

This reflexivity and world-action-self reciprocity is not a simple, everyday thing, either. It seems to be a process shared with Malcolm X and Angela Davis, at least based on these excerpts. The important thing is that this fluidity and potential change does not undermine one's ability to be active and engaged. Being in-process does not mean that action is inconsequential or incomplete. It may, and I think ought to, describe how activism is process-oriented; process-oriented in that what is being done now is part of the largest timeliness of involvement and change but also how the self is processed and reprocessed by a life of critical activism and theory. Strength in stance is not the same as an unmoving stance, fluidity does not undermine fortitude and action.

Should I be surprised? Not exactly. There are two archetypes of renowned philosophers that come to mind: One is the philosopher who develops a theory from bedrock to the heavens throughout his or her life, Kant and Spinoza are two examples; the other provides a landmark theory and later in life completely contradicts that theory, Wittgenstein and Descartes do this. Which, I wonder, best describes this type of critical self-reflection. Descartes's La Monde (unfinished) actually shares a few qualities with Spinoza's Ethica, so substantially one style does not exclude the outcomes of the other. Does the lifelong work require a constant self-criticality that prevents a finished piece? Does a finished work allow for a radical self-critique (what Malcolm X may have undergone in some speculative alternative history) that is prevented by regular revisions and reconsiderations? 

I often write papers until I can't look at them anymore. I research, think, write, think, reread, research, rewrite, and so on until I can't think anymore on the subject. I end up with a piece that, with some time and distance, I can then divorce from myself adequately to say, "Yes, this is on the right track," or "No, I can't hold to this argument because..." It isn't until I can finish and establish distance that I can really disagree and self-critique. Of course, not everyone works and thinks like this. Perhaps the trick of the lifelong masterpiece is to be able to open oneself up to radical criticism without distance, to incorporate that into one's perspective. Oddly, I can identify how Spinoza--constantly toiling away at his Ethica, grinding lenses until the glass filled his lungs and killed him--and Wittgenstein--despite his radical self-critique embodied in Philosophical Investigations--both lived their philosophies. Kant never traveled more than twenty miles from his home; does this prevent a more divorced critique of his theory? Descartes traveled but created a philosophical mindset that allowed for gruesome vivisection (literally: "life-dividing") experiments for the next several hundred years.

Of course, I don't have a conclusion. (I haven't even finished Angela Davis's article.) This is more a reflection on how life and action interrelate and inform the world (in its fullness) of our selves (in our emptiness). I consider how Sartre's Being and Nothingness creates a self defined by no-thing as it makes contact with the world of being. It is divisive of the world in ways I cannot easily reconcile, but appreciate how this emptiness provides space for recreation and redefinition. Foucault and Gramsci describe the ways the what-who of a person are defined by hierarchies of power, but it does not mean that we are limited in any essential sense. Rather, we are part of fragile systems that we need, in terms of justice, to break and redefine as we live our lives. I do not want fullness--content, stagnant, static--I want wholeness--dynamic, ecological, rhythmic. 

Saturday, February 11, 2012

Meditation: Wheel & Texture

The wheel of the bike:
a useful emptiness of
traction and texture.

...

Thirty spokes
meet in the hub.
Where the wheel isn't
is where it's useful.

Hollowed out,
clay makes a pot.
Where the pot's not
is where it's useful.

Cut doors and windows
to make a room.
Where the room isn't,
there's room for you.

So the profit in what is
is in the use of what isn't.
- Tao Te Ching, "The uses of not," Lao Tzu (tr. Ursula Le Guin)

...

"Contact is beyond fullness or emptiness, beyond connection and disconnection.... This incommensurable, absolutely heterogeneous repetition opens up an irreducible strangeness of each one of these touches to the other."
- Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural

---

As a reprieve from William Coperthwaite's A Handmade Life, I sat about and gathered my thoughts. I realized I was sitting in domo-style and took the moment to reflect--at least until my ankles began to whine. My eyes fell on a bicycle wheel (my friend Cori's) and my mind also returned to the lessons of Tao mentioned above. "The uses of not" isn't exaclty accurate--though it is lyrically and intellectually pleasing--concerning the wheel, but what strikes me is its reflection on myself.

We are full of emptiness, not in a spiritual sense but in a mental sense; we have space for our minds to flutter and pray and stretch and turn in on themselves. We have within ourselves enough space to learn and adequate space to forget. We are wheels in that we touch the world and one another on only the periphery while some much more is able to pass through, dwell within, and move back into the larger world. I am glad for this flexibility, this internal openness.

Nancy has grabbed much of my attention and I bring him in now because of his comments on the strangeness of people. As a phenomenologist, he emphasizes the shared flesh or texture of the world--something I have written on before--but it is through the radical "strangeness" of others--people, objects, places, what-have-you--that we experience them. It is in the disuniform nature of that shared cloth that we are able to discern the world in rich, enticing, and beautiful ways.

The medley arises from how we are full of emptiness but able to c experience traction with the world. The wheel touches the earth and is able to push along and guide direction. If the pavement were like the tire, the nobby rubber forms would lock against one another; the two textures would become one. If we come into contact with those that are too similar (lovers lost in one another, interlocutors arguing endlessly, the lonely souls in a rehab facility), then we can lock into inconclusive patterns. To escape these behaviors, we require the empty space where we can reflect and be pushed and challenged, where the wheel itself can change. Nancy's strangeness is integral not just for our contact with the world, but how we interact and respond to the stimulus of those (human and more than human) around us. That strangeness alone speaks to how we can lock into one another but it takes our--incomplete--emptiness (the texture beneath the texture) to go beyond that immediate experience and break from the old crystallized patterns.

Wednesday, February 8, 2012

Paper Thin Walls, Whole Story

I noticed a few errors which I hope I've addressed.

---

Personal Essay II
Anton Carew
English 305, Professor Sewell
Miskatonic University

The walls of the study carrel were paper thin. Not that it mattered much. It was in the library with the others, providing an alcove for study and, to a smaller extent, escape. I spent five, ten, then fifteen hours a day in there as the semester wound on, the dissertation in my head gestating and appearing suddenly on bits of paper, on the computer screen, scribbled into the margins of the books I bought or borrowed. I could shut the door and close myself off from the world, only noticing the scrabble of a pen, the clatter of a forcefully used keyboard, the flipping of dry leaves of paper, the rumble of someone on the floor blowing his or her nose. I came prepared with a thermos of green tea and several sandwiches, though I'd often have more than crumbs leftover and my multiple visits to the café were for nothing more than hot water. The days I taught for my advisor would break the rhythm, but I began to arrive to class later, to emphasize the final paper they were all supposed to be working on, and throw my lecture notes willynilly into my messenger bag and shuffle off. I could feel the weight of their apprehension, their hundreds of pages waiting for me at the end of the semester, and the innumerable hours spent assessing them. Funny how now my writing seems so insubstantial and unimportant, how I would barter to regain those quotidian rhythms with everything but my soul. A soul: something I once set aside as a romantic daydream now feels so central, if utterly deflated. 

I'd spent the Saturday in the carrel, noticing more than usual the thinness of the walls and how the neighbor to my left--present, it seemed, as often as I was despite the numerous underused alternatives--seemed to read his research material aloud. Becoming distracted, I realized he must be a student of language, either ancient or exotic if not both, because I could discern nothing familiar in the muffled intonations. Despite the ambiguity, he spoke with a rhythmic, even musical manner that even after I returned to my work I sensed not just through the wall, but behind me as if someone were peering through the small inset window on the door. More than once I glanced behind me expecting a student of mine or some neglected friend furtively standing there, fingers poised claw-like behind the glass. After several such inconclusive distractions, I made an excursion to the restroom; the opportunity allowed me an investigatory glance at the various students--few on a Saturday, but all embedded in their work--and some deliberate spying on my neighbor. 

His head bobbed up and down as if in mosque-style prayer as he studied. It gave reason to his rhythmic chanting and I wondered if he were Muslim or had assumed the habit as a neurosis. His unkempt hair was flecked with shimmers of grey and I could see his olive complexion by his widely protruding ears. The small desk was littered deeply with open books: old heavy tomes, many with broken spines and ruddy old covers. One corner of the desk was cleared for a spiral bound notebook, its revealed page thick with a tight, incomprehensible chicken scratch. Something in his motions, his queer dedication, or the admirable mess he labored in captivated me and I stared for longer than intended. I began to discern not just his scribbling, but clearly described diagrams or hieroglyphs of esoteric meaning. In one of the opened books an expansive two page illustration detailed a circle of people in an ancient stone room where braziers' listing fire cast unnatural shadows on the walls and floor. The image assumed some early cubist style, apparently depicting more walls than a traditional vantage would allow, suggesting fleshy and angular bodies that inspired complaints in my empty stomach. 

His head jerked up, dragging me from my focus and without thinking I twisted myself away from the window, jabbed my key into my carrel's lock, and slipped in. He was silent for a long time as I calmed my breathing and absently flipped pages. I brushed off the anxiety as the result of overeager snooping, an unusual voyeurism on a fellow student and researcher. He must be analyzing fiction of a bygone era or the language was only an addendum to some sort of religious study, an examination of medieval mysticism or something like that. I had jumped to conclusions and then been surprised when his research was not as expected. Being sly did not come naturally to me and it left me titillated in a surprising and captivated way. The unwholesome thrill unnerved me and I tried to placed it behind me, but no amount of tea seemed to bring me back to my studies. I folded up my papers, slid them into their awaiting folders in the cabinet, replaced my books on the shelf, and locked away my little monastic cell. My neighbor's door had been left just slightly open and against my better judgement I slipped in for uncertain mischief. My heart leapt again to my throat, but the illustration was hidden again between covers. The books were in various languages--one distinctly German, another two or three in Italian or Latin, but most entirely unknown to me. I noticed a small unmarked vial tucked in the bookshelf, containing several orange capsules. The absence of labeling set me off, though I am familiar enough with the contents. His bobbing head made that much more sense. 

Considering my predicament in a briefly cleared mind, I left the carrel and made my way to the stairs. I caught the small man at the corner of my eye, but prevented myself from any egregiously suspicious observation. He was Middle Eastern, maybe Indian, or perhaps Egyptian, and seemed overly small, as if trying to avoid attention by curling up into himself. He was a snail of a man--I decided--carrying his literary hoard, his rightful shelter being the pages of ancient books, of times that he managed to understand better than the present. The University was large enough that we may never have crossed paths until that night and if it hadn't been for those paper thin walls I might have gone on blissfully ignorant of this man and his esoteric studies. But I doubt it. 

The way home was haunted by suspicions of other presences that refused to dissipate and, upon reflection, became ever more intense. The nights bore that wintry dark which gobbles up the light in its amorphous starless skies. Somewhere above, the moon danced, though its only sign was the infusion of sickly radiance in an ever-shifting formation of clouds while earthbound lanterns flickered sodium yellow. The campus was suspended between the early tittering of youths and the boisterous return of those celebrants; they were somewhere, I told myself, enjoying the night far away from this particular route. Shadows seemed to race on all sides, encircling me and cutting off my escape and as I turned to face them, a street lamp would flicker its unwholesome glow and nothing unusual would be there; a flash of darkness and then the expected outlines of denuded trees and shrubs, walkways and banisters, ivy-covered buildings with shriveled leaves rattling in the night. I wanted to run, to lock the door behind me and turn on all the lights until this malignant mood passed, but I refused the fancy with all the determination I could muster, wishing it away with clenched, pocketed fists. 

I was out of breath when I locked and bolted the door behind me. The entry light hummed it's fluorescence warmly and I stood, rubbing my shoulders with my hands, trying to shake off more than the cold. A deep-rooted scientism jostled and jarred with my sentiments, shriveling slightly at this undeniable confoundment. I put water on for tea, but only after letting the lights flutter gradually into life, banishing the shadows only too slowly. The entry light remained on, breaking my childhood habit of turning every light out as I passed; a habit that frustrated my quiet, sensitive mother to no end, though she always affirmed the habit with a wavering smile. I placed a spoon slathered with honey into the tea pot, the water in the kettle stirring to life, and sprinkled loose petals and leaves of jasmine into their silver chassis. Trying to reconnect with my usual absentmindedness, I  opened the fridge--an old, polished Frigidaire I rescued from my grandparents' before my sister had the chance to give it to Goodwill--only to blanche at the notion of eating anything. My stomach churned restlessly, though the promise of tea and sleep calmed it once the door to the fridge closed. I flipped on the main room light--a living room and bedroom--and nibbled on dry, salty crackers from the pantry until the water boiled, all the while watching the slow retreat of the dark. 

The arm chair wrapped itself around me as I set myself into it, an immense relief sloughing off as I sipped the still too hot tea, relishing the scalding floral sweetness on its end. The days in the library, of endless reading and writing and solitude had gotten to me; that was all. My fellow scholar was probably in the same boat, though our brief encounter suggested a strong, perhaps proud foreignness. My progress on my own work had been substantial and I may benefit from a holiday, rejuvenating myself on more than stale or soggy sandwiches. I had lost weight--a common trend of mine during periods of academic intensity--and allowed friends' calls to go unanswered. Tomorrow, yes tomorrow I would catch up, get a drink or just enjoy some sunshine--if that skulking sun ever showed its face again--and conversation over tea and coffee. I felt my appetite return, but let it grumble as a sort of vengeance on its earlier hesitancy. I thought of rich, swirling cream; a chai latté with a shake of nutmeg, cinnamon, and brown sugar; of the forgiving flesh of the baguettes served at that particular coffee shop, the buttery crumble of a scone at the other. I'll give myself a holiday and allow this little episode to fade. 

Logic seemed to surface again as I considered the whole event with greater removal and objectivity. It all could have been a panic attack, the result of those upcoming papers and my poor preparation for handling them, or just some fear of actually finishing the dissertation... When was the last time I met with my advisor? He was out of the country until Wednesday, but we ought to discuss my progress shortly thereafter. It was all a conflation of forces, of the slow tides that I had refused to acknowledge. I had been taken up by a riptide, but was returning to a more comfortable ebb and flow. The waves lapped beneath me as I pulled the comforter over my shoulders, up to my chin, and dozed off. 

---

It was nearly a week before I made it back to the carrel. Everything took on a peculiar, distracting keenness. For once I wasn't disheveled as I taught my classes, I stayed after chatting with students, encouraging them on their various projects and passions. I noticed a young woman in the class had taken a liking to me: a short curly-haired brunette who wore an obvious spunk and witty style. Upon reflection, I could recall how she was often eager to participate in class, to stir me from my lecture and develop a conversational, seminar vibe. The second class of the week I let the classroom shift: students spoke up from different corners, popcorn popping in a delightful, chaotic medley of experiences, interpretations, and insights. Students provided novel, perspicacious observations on the readings, on subjects and ideas I had learned four, five, six years before. It was new to them, often radically new, and seemed to stir me from my slumber even more.

After the second class a handful of students gathered at a coffeeshop near campus. It became clear that in my absence they had built up a support web for one another, a study group that gave them the environment they wanted in the classroom; I watched as they bounced around in open criticism and playful condenscencion of one another. At first, I was eager to join in, to offer my own ideas and wizened critique and understanding. In no great length of time, though, I sat back and sipped my coffee--heavy with cream--soaking in their vigor and camaraderie. I inserted small comments, used one of their computers to dig up articles they might find interesting. The brunette--her name I recalled was Jezebel but all her colleagues refered to her as Bel--schemed her way into leading class discussion the next week, staring at me with uncanny confidence. Her fellow students liked the idea and they, with syllabus in hand, began revamping the next month of classes, setting up their own alternative. 

Spring had begun eeking its way forward, drawing out the days with pleasant, sunny intensity; but night had set before I left, carrying with it the last breaths of a hesitant winter. I had only my jacket and scarf which I tightened around me. My stomach quaked with sloshing coffee, my fingers jittery with caffeine. Jezebel--I refused to take the more familiar appellation which seemed, somehow, unchaste--caught up to me and offered me a ride. She pointed to a second- or third-hand sedan, the chassis rusted around the wheels and a stubborn passenger window that I assumed refused to wind entirely. I said no, that I was going to work at the library--a short stroll--and put the caffeine to good use. I rarely drank coffee, but something about the evening had suspended that abstinence. She smiled and I responded in kind, perhaps too much so, and walked away with her warm brown eyes on me--I imagined, at least--until I reached the corner.

I quickly regretted the decision. The cold snapped at my ears, at my ankles along my too-short thrift store trousers, and crawled into my jacket sleeves insidiously. I quickened my clip toward the library, feeling a brazen, even malicious intent in the night. Shadows danced as cars passed, taking on brief, perturbing forms just before fading. They took on an unwelcome sharpness, just as everything had since my last late night in the library, and I felt the urge to break into a run. The steady incandescence of the library façade--a brick firmament testifying to the heavenly status of education--apparently banished the phantoms. I tugged at the door with undue force and let the suction drag me in. It was quiet, the public terminals near the lobby almost empty, and one lonely student at the front desk read a half-hidden notebook. It was the Friday just after midterms--from which I excused my students--and the only sound was the faint fluttering of pages and the hushed high whine of the archaic ventilation system. The student at the front desk noticed me and shoved his notebook under the desk in a feeble attempt to conceal this small breach in regulation.

I avoided the wide main staircase for an access stairwell, brilliantly lit by humming fluorescent lights. My quick steps and hard shoes echoed in a mumbling chorus on the linoleum and unforgiving walls. Upstairs, I stepped into the bathroom, the same soft humming of the lights sang as I washed my face and forced my breath to slow. I felt feverish, my forehead washed of its beads of sweat, and my eyes widely staring back at me through the silvered pane. My hands roughed dry on crinkly towels and then tugged at my shirt and jacket--damp creeped along its cuffs--hoping to feign some composure. Laughter lay somewhere inside me, bottled up with anxiety and a strained, unnatural tension. I chuckled with numb ambiguity, unnable to make light of myself. Several deep breaths later I stepped out into the hallways toward my carrel.

I expected his light on but only a series of blackened windows met me. I forced my hand steady as I inserted the key and turned the handle. Everything was as I left it, all in its rightful place, and I breathed deeply again. I pulled out a frayed spiralbound notebook, a stack of books from the shelves, and one of my awaiting black pens. Cracking the topmost book--some critical reading of Tocqueville--and let the words rise up to meet me. They were dense and warm and provided a hard, certain texture to the unnerving ethereal quality that had chased me thence. After the first several pages the words took on a peculiar foreign attitude, somehow modulating on the page the way the ocean floor shifts underneath a passing wave. I could see the words, but as they sang in my mind they took on unnatural yellow tonalities; they became slippery and lolled around with oceanic weight.

I closed the book and opened another, not glancing at the title. The words roiled on the page, intoning themselves in my mind in unimaginable ways. They were the words of dreams, juxtaposed with alien meanings the way one knows Arabic or German in a dream, speaking and understanding in perfect fluent clarity only to wake and feel that knowledge evaporating away. I tried to focus, to read each word with its own anglophone certainty, its Saxon or French root; but letters and syllables built, each on the next, in precipitous architectures of sound. Again and again, even flipping through my spiral notebook with growing anxiety and inescapable surreal fear, the words became a heady, abyssal sound. Alien phonemes of geologic age meant nothing to me but each iteration brought on new vertiginous depths, each haunting me with ineffable meaning.

The door slammed behind me, sealing my keys, coat, and scarf within while the reverberation echoed through the floor. I ran, holding onto banisters and tracing my finger along walls on my way to the exit. Bulbs flickered, revealing the shadows beneath the light, hidden between pages, tucked like bookmarks between the covers in every cranny of the library. My feet tripped themselves in my haste, fearing that I might step on some tangible specter waiting to grab hold. The student looked up, shouted something at me, as I broke into the sharp, cold night--his words chased after me, carrying that otherworldly annunciation--and I felt liberated despite the dark. Icy air stabbed at my unaccustomed lungs as I raced through campus, heading into town, following the trail of street lamps and the raucous vigor of youth. 

I stumbled past my apartment entrance, wheezing and frustrated. I checked my pocket for my wallet and strolled, bent half-over, into town. In a dimly lit bar, the dance floor rustling to life at the other end, I downed a double whiskey and grabbed my beer. Someone nearby whooted in my honor, oblivious to my frantic state and confusing it with something celebratory. I grabbed a pen from my pocket and a stack of napkins, thinking I might record the events. My hand seized in stark fear above the napkin, fearful of what letters or strange glyphs I might inscribe. As the whiskey gripped my stomach, I was able to attend to the surrounding sounds, the rumble of words redefined by software and the conversations hollered between friends and strangers. They were clear and comprehensible. Words loaded with their own textired meanings but ultimately a human meaning, something my mind could grasp and comprehend. I sat alone for several minutes, ordering another beer and whiskey that I sipped with gradually steadying hands.

---

I met Elwynn Caldwell in this state. He finished with his second whiskey before he spoke to me. It was clear he needed either clarity or confusion in great quantity. More than I could providem, anyway. I did what I could: I bought him another drink and listened to his story. I have recalled it here to the best of my ability, using his same sobering words where I could. When I sat with him, I had just been turned down by a classmate and made a fool, in a small way but a fool all the same. A night next to this half-familiar fellow seemed better than moping around the bar or chasing after friends out in the chill night. 

I met Caldwell at the coffeeshop with his students. Bel and Jacob were in his class and when I saw them bantering loudly in their small crowd, I decided to sit with them. The lanky man that had listened and joked drily with us then was an entirely different creature than this half-frozen, increasingly drunk heap of poorly fitting clothes. He had been mostly quiet, prefering to have others hush when he spoke than to raise his voice. At the coffeehouse he had a monkish austerity and humor to him. He did not cause many laughs, but smiles rippled around the table as he made allusions to theorists he enjoyed and the faculty of the University. Caldwell made no effort to conceal his distaste for some among of the instructors in the humanities; he even chuckled mischieviously as he recounted how he and the younger Professor McEwan had openly condescended against one another the previous year.

If it weren't for his unshakable anxiety in Kiely's Pub, I would have expected a joke of it, that he had simply left his jacket in the restroom or on another chair and was using me for some private laugh. But as his tale closed, I was certain that he was in earnest. The details took on ever increasing clarity and I doubted--though I wanted to believe--he had spent too many quiet hours in the library and was suffering from nervous exhaustion. That sounds like a page out of time: nervous exhaustion. Would I next diagnose an energetic and unpredictable woman with "uterus fever." All the same, I could do little besides take in his story and believe, despite myself, in its verisimilitude. 

The library had closed before he finished the narrative, otherwise I would have gone to recover his keys and coat in his stead. His apartment, I learned as he stumbled on my arm, was one of those second floor spaces above a shop. With no clear landlord or neighbor in sight, I sobered up and dragged him to the apartment I share with two others, Jesse and Upton. Caldwell had long since fallen into a stuporous sleep, dragging his feet as much as walking. I plopped him onto the couch, set out a glass of water, and strolled down the hall. I saw the flickering of a computer screen creep under Jesse's door and heard the subdued grunts as he played one of his games. I thought of how Caldwell had said, "the shadows beneath the light," and could not make out his meaning. I decided it was either my fatigue or his. I heard him grumble as I prepared for bed. Something rustled and splattered to the floor.

Feeble streetlights slipped through the threadbare curtains on the window, dancing with the dark of the room. Caldwell seemed to be sitting up: a black silhouette on black. As I focused, I wondered tiredly what might have happened. Other forms congealed out of the darkness. Caldwell was sitting perfectly straight and impassive on the sofa, as I'd left him except for his posture. The plastic cup rolled from side to side in its plashed water as it whispered rhythmically. The water glimmered with a confused, refracted indigo; I could not discern the light's source. A frame of yellow light surrounded the door from the hall, but, I realized, it was not a perfect frame. My eyes struggled between the mundane light and the smudge of unmoving but rippling darkness between the door and myself. 

The air was still and I realized Caldwell wasn't breathing. I wasn't breathing. Whatever it was between the door and myself wasn't breathing. Somehow, over an infinite distance I could make out the clatter of keys and remote, monosyllabic mutters. Blood pumped through my neck, pounded in my ears, and the room seemed to flush--sanguine red on inky black--as my pulse throbbed. With infinite care I raised my foot, toe still touching the floor, and stepped back. I repeated the step with the opposite.

It all happened at once after that. The floorboard creaked and a sofa spring sang its queer dirge. Darkness like heavy, stagnant air moved in a tidal rush toward me, split or confused by the two simultaneous sounds. The door opened, its hinge howling against the other sounds. Light flooded in and blinded my dark-accustomed eyes. Upton and the woman with him were caught mid-laugh only to choke on it. My vision blurred, accompanied by a dull thrum behind my eyes as too much light came at me too quickly. Still I could not dismiss the slithering, ichorous darkness as it crawled with wicked speed out the door. Upton's company tripped and fell to the ground suddenly unbalanced and unable to breathe. Caldwell was bathed in the light of the hallwaye. He was bone white, and frozen stockstill. 

I remained planted in place. The stark fear of that thing bearing down on me, the creak in the floor, the way it moved without moving, without any clear concept of momentum. I was certain it might return and the only thing I could do was stay still. Then the hollowness in my chest rattled and I struggled to breathe as if the air had been knocked out of me. I saw that Upton was trying to help the woman struggling to breathe in the hallway and went to Caldwell. His his eyes were wide, the whites pierced by pupils dialated grotesquely. His forehead was damp with cold sweat. I feared him dead, or near enough to it, but I felt the thin rasp of breath on my cheek and eventually--though not nearly as soon as I would have liked--he blinked. He was entirely unresponsive to my comments and I went out to check on Upton and the girl.

Upton had been calling to me to get some wet rags or bandages as he held her. When I brought them out I saw why: He'd rolled up her shirt and along her midsection and right side were striated burns--or what I thought could be burns--where small rivulets of blood dripped. She breathing, but with difficulty. Her hands quaked in shock. I grabbed the phone and dialed, babbled something about a burn, an accident, I don't know what. Something prevented me from calling them friends; they were just "people" in my place, hurt and confused and scared. They kept me on the line, though I couldn't think of any way to describe what had happened or how. I tried to run through the scenario but it was only later, only when I tried to write this that it came back to me. A smell had been left in its wake, the smell of scarred flesh and the fear and something like an absence, the way rubbing alcohol smells when it evaporates. I opened the door and tried to coax the air out. The cold hit me like a brick, the sweat all over me suddenly becoming frigid. I shivered fiercely and I wasn't sure if it was the cold or the fear.

The fire truck mutely flashed its lights outside, piercing the night like so many spears, and I led the men in. They whiffed the air and muttered to one another as they knelt to help Libby--Upton was calling her that as he tried to nurse her wounds. The pair of firefighters spoke in unwavering voices. It wasn't until the ambulance came that anyone noticed Caldwell, inanimate on the couch. Libby had calmed somewhat, though I think it was the shock setting in, as they set her on a gurney. Caldwell allowed himself to be half carried by the firemen and set in a tight corner of the ambulance where they secured him in with a seatbelt like a baby's carseat. They gave the straps a hard tug and passed a thumbs up to the driver. Libby was sleeping or sedated serenely on the gurney, looked over by an EMT. They had given Upton and me a look over, saying nothing in the process. The police had arrived by then and the two of us were taken to the station, each in his own cruiser, for a statement.

The officers handled us softly, all things considered. We had two people in our apartment requiring urgent care while we were shaken but physically fine. The deputy said something about a burglar--which I wanted to deny but failed to--that was scribbled into the report. A couple of younger officers tried to argue with the deputy that we ought to stay over night, and I was clearheaded enough to see they thought we were, in some manner, quilty. The deputy presented a stoic face, took the two aside and spoke plainly to them out of earshot. They grabbed their coats and scurried out. Upton and I didn't speak about what happened when we were driven home, nor the next day.

On the second day, Upton went to the hospital to see Libby. I stood in the hallway and listened as he tried to get her to talk to him. Walking past the door to the bathroom I glanced back and saw the bandages running all along her side. The crisp linen folded neatly under her arms. She stared at him, anger red on her face. Beneath the anger--something about the fatigue of her eyes and the circles beneath them--I could see that the anger was a veneer; it covered the fear that kept her up except for the painkillers running in through her IV.

Upton stormed out, pushing me against the wall in the process. I let him get ahead of me and then followed him to the main door. I stopped at the front desk and asked to see Caldwell. The rosey cheeked, rotund nurse explained that I couldn't. When prodded, she said plainly, "Mr. Caldwell is in psychiatric care. No visitors. Doctor's orders," a line she didn't mind handing to me. I asked for his doctor, that I was the last one to seem him before he was admitted, that I was a friend. After prodding her, she eyed a doctor as he passed in a hurry with a clipboard in hand. I took the cue--intentional or otherwise--and chased after him. It was Caldwell's doctor, from whom all I got was, "He's nonresponsive since they brought him in."

I walked with him, prying with any question I could muster. I tried to explain what had happened, the memory still jumbled madly. He stoppped at a counter, spoke in an aggravated tone to a nurse, jotted down a note on a pad, but then left it there. I watched him walk away as a wave of med students with an instructor cut off my route. The nurse at the counter watched me, glanced down at the pad, and resumed her work on the day's crossword puzzle. I lifted the pad; in tight medical scrawl read, "Breakdown institutionalized prognosis inconclusive." I tore at the pad, but the nurse grabbed my wrist and neatly extricated the sheet. Her eyes on me, she spat a wad of gum into the paper, crumpled up the paper, and threw it in the trash.

I told Bel about the visit. She tried to get in to see him, trying to explain--first--that he was her instructor and--after that--that he was her boyfriend. She got a skeptical look, but they let her peer through window, the kind crisscrossed with reinforcing wire. She said she had expected a padded room, but it wasn't. He sat at the edge of a white iron bed, a lumpy mattress and single cover over top, a pillow neatly set at the head. Blue and white tiles lined the floor. And there was Caldwell: sitting at the edge of the bed, hands gripping his knees, pale and stockstill.

---

Mister Carew,
Though you have here a fine display of your flamboyant style and diction, the language comes off as trite and assumed. Your twist does not make up for an inconsistent voice. This shows some improvement over, at least in potential, from your first paper. I will remind you that this is a nonfiction course and, for your sake, I hope you realize THAT for the final paper. I will not pass you if you try to hand in another piece of fantasy like this. 

C+

Monday, February 6, 2012

Paper Thin Walls Pt 2

It was a week before I made it back to the carrel. Everything that week had a peculiar keenness. For once I wasn't disheveled as I taught my classes, I stayed after chatting with students, encouraging them on their various projects and passions. I noticed a young woman in the class had taking a liking to me, a short curly-headed brunette who wore her hair short with obvious spunk. Upon reflection, I could recall how she was often eager to participate in class, to stir me from my lecture and develop a conversational, seminar vibe. The second class of the week I let the classroom shift: students spoke up from different corners, popcorn popping in a delightful, chaotic medley of experiences, interpretations, and insights. Students provided novel, perspicacious observations on the readings, on subjects and ideas I had learned four, five, six years before. It was new to them, often radically new, and seemed to stir me from my slumber even more.

After the second class a handful of students gathered at a coffeeshop near campus. It became clear that in my absence, they had built up a support web for one another, a study group that gave them the environment they wanted in the classroom in which they bounced around in open criticism and playful condenscencion of one another. At first, I was eager to join in, to offer my own ideas and wizened critique and udnerstanding; but in no great length of time I sat back and sipped my coffee, heavy with cream, soaking in their vigor and camaraderie. I inserted small comments, used one of their computers to dig up articles they might find interesting. The brunette--her name I recalled was Jezebel but all her colleagues refered to her as Bel--schemed her way into leading class discussion the next week, staring at me with uncanny confidence. Her fellow students liked the idea and they, with syllabus in hand, began revamping the next month of classes, setting up their own alternative. 

Spring had begun eeking its way forward, drawing out the days with pleasant, sunny intensity. Night had set before I left, carrying with it the last breaths of a hesitant winter. I had only my jacket and scarf which I tightened around me. My stomach quaked with sloshing coffee, my fingers jittery with caffeine. Jezebel--I refused to take the more familiar appellation which seemed, somehow, unchaste--caught up to me and offered me a ride. She pointed to a second- or third-hand sedan, the chassis rusted around the wheels and a stubborn passenger window that I assumed refused to wind entirely. I said no, that I was going to work at the library--a short stroll--and put the caffeine to good use. I rarely drank coffee, but something about the evening had suspended that abstainence and suggested its import. She smiled and I responded in kind, perhaps too much so, and walked away, her warm brown eyes on me--I imagined, at least--until I reached the corner.

I quickly regretted the decision. The cold snapped at my ears, at my ankles along my too-short thrift store trousers, and crawled under into my jacket sleeves insidiously. I quickened my clip toward the library, feeling a brazen malignity in the night. Shadows danced as cars passed, taking on brief, perturbing forms just before fading. They took on an unwelcome sharpness, just as everything had since my last late night in the library, and I felt the urge to break into a run. The steady lights of the library façade--a brick firmament testifying to the heavenly status of education--apparently banishing the phantoms. I tugged at the door with undue force and let the suction drag me in. It was quiet, the public terminals near the lobby almost empty, and one lonely student at the front desk with a notebook half-hidden behind the desk. It was Friday just after midterms and the only sound was the faint fluttering of pages and the hushed high whine of the archaic ventilation system. The student at the front desk noticed me and shoved his notebook entirely under the desk in a feeble attempt to conceal this small breach in regulation.

I avoided the wide main staircase for an access stairwell, brilliantly lit by humming fluorescent lights. My quick steps and hard shoes echoed in a mumbling chorus on the linoleum and unforgiving walls. Upstairs, I stepped into the bathroom, the same soft humming my company as I washed my face and forced my breath to slow. I felt feverish, my forehead washed of its beads of sweat, and my eyes widely staring back at me through the silvered pane. Straightening, my hands roughed dry on crinkly towels and tugged at my shirt and jacket--damp creeped along the cuffs of my jacket--hoping to feign some composure to myself. Laughter lay somewhere inside me, bottled up with anxiety and a strained, unnatural tension. I chuckled with numb ambiguity, unnable to make light of myself. Several deep breaths later I stepped out into the hallways toward my carrel.

I expected his light on but only a series of blackened windows met me. I forced my hand steady as I inserted the key and turned the handle. Everything was as I left it, all in its rightful place, and I breathed deeply again. I pulled out a frayed spiralbound notebook, a stack of books from the shelves, and one of my awaiting black pens. Cracking the topmost book--some critical reading of Tocqueville, if I recall correctly--and let the words rise up to meet me. They were dense and warm and provided a hard, certain texture to the unnerving ethereal quality that had chased me thence. After the first several pages, the words took on a peculiar foreign attitude, as if somehow infected or modulated the way the ocean floor shifts underneath a passing wave. I could see the words, but as they sang in my mind they took on unnatural yellow tonalities; they became slippery and lolled around with sickly, oceanic weight.

I closed the book and opened another, not even glancing at the title. The words roiled as if boiling, intoning themselves in unimaginable ways. They were the words of dreams, juxtaposed with alien meanings the way one knows Arabic or German in a dream, speaking and understanding in perfect fluent clarity only to wake and feel that knowledge evaporating away. I tried to focus, to ead each word with its own anglophone certainty, its Saxon or French root. The letters and syllables each a constituitive building block on the next. Again and again, even flipping through my spiral notebook with growing anxiety and inescapable surreal fear, the words became a heady, abyssal sound. Alien phonemes of geologic age meant nothing to me but each iteration brought on new vertiginous depths, each haunting me with ineffable meaning.

The door slammed behind me, sealing my keys, coat, and scarf within while the reverberation echoed through the floor. I ran, holding onto banisters and tracing my finger along walls on my way to the exit. Incandescent bulbs flickered, revealing the shadows beneath the light, hidden between pages, tucked like bookmarks between the covers in every cranny of the library. My feet tripped themselves in my haste, fearing that I might step on some tangible specter waiting to grab hold. The student looked up, shouted something at me, as I broke into the sharp, cold night--his words chased after me, carrying that otherworldly annunciation--and I felt liberated despite the dark. Icy air stabbed at my unaccustomed lungs as I raced through campus, heading into town, following the trail of street lamps and the raucous vigor of youth. 

I stumbled past my apartment entrance, wheezing and frustrated. I checked my pocket for my wallet and strolled, bent half-over, into town. In a dimly lit bar, the dance floor rustling to life at the other end, I downed a double whiskey and grabbed my beer. Someone nearby whooted in my honor, either oblivious to my frantic state or confusing it with something celebratory. I grabbed a pen from my pocket and a stack of napkins, thinking I might record the events. My hand seized in stark fear above the napkin, fearful of what letters or strange glyphs I might inscribe. As the whiskey gripped my stomach, I was able to attend to the surrounding sounds, the rumble of words redefined by software and the conversations hollered between friends and strangers. They were clear and comprehensible. Words loaded with their own meaning but ultimately a human meaning, something my mind could grasp and comprehend. I sat alone for several minutes, ordering another beer and whiskey on the rocks that I sipped with gradually steadying hands.

Tuesday, January 31, 2012

Paper thin wall, pt 1

The walls of the study carrel were paper thin. Not that it mattered much. It was in the library with the other and provided an alcove for study and, to a smaller extent, escape. I spent five, ten, then fifteen hours a day in there as the semester wound on, the dissertation in my head gestating and appearing suddenly on bits of paper, on the computer screen, scribbled into the margins of the books I bought. I could shut the door and close myself off from the world, only noticing the scrabble of a pen, the clatter of a forcefully used keyboard, the flipping of dry leaves of paper, the rumble of someone on the floor blowing his or her nose. I came prepared with a thermos of green tea and several sandwiches, though I'd often have more than crumbs leftover while I had visited the café multiple times for more hot water. The days I taught for my advisor would break te rhythm, but I began to arrive later, to emphasize the final paper they were all supposed to be working on, and throw my lecture notes willynilly into my messenger bag and shuffle off. I could feel the weight of their apprehension, their hundreds of pages waiting for me at the end of the semester, and the innumerable hours spent assessing them. Funny how now my writing seems so insubstantial and unimportant, how I would barter to regain those quotidian rhythms with everything but my soul. A soul: something I once set aside as a romantic daydream now feels so central, if utterly deflated. 

I'd spent the Saturday in the carrel, noticing more than usual the thinness of the walls and how the neighbor to my left--present, it seemed, as often as I was despite the numerous underused options--seemed to read his research material aloud. Becoming distracted, I realized he must be a student of language, either ancient or exotic if not both, because I could discern nothing familiar in the muffled intonations. Despite the ambiguity, he spoke with a rhythmic, even musical manner that even after I returned to my work I sensed not just through the wall, but behind me as if someone were peering through the small inset window on the door. More than once I glanced behind me expecting a student of mine or some neglected friend furtively standing their, fingers poised claw-like behind the glass. After several such inconclusive distractions, I made an excursion to the restroom; the opportunity allowed me an investigatory glance at the various students, few on a Saturday but all embedded in their work, and deliberate spying on my neighbor. 

His head bobbed up and down as if in mosque-style prayer as he studied. It gave reason to his rhythmic chanting and I wondered if he were a Muslim or had simply picked up the habit as a neurosis. His unkempt hair was flecked with shimmers of grey and I could see his olive complexion by his widely protruding ears. The small desk was littered deeply with open books, old heavy tomes, many with broken spines and ruddy old covers; but one corner of the desk was clear for a spiral bound notebook, its revealed page thick with a tight, incomprehensible chicken scratch. Something in his motions, his queer dedication, or the admirable mess he labored in captivated me and I stared for longer than intended. I began to discern not just his scribbling, but clearly described diagrams or hieroglyphs that I could not make out. In one of the books left open, an expansive two page illustration detailed a circle of people and in an ancient stone room, braziers with listing fire cast unnatural shadows on the walls, on the floor. The image took on a cubist style, apparently depicting more walls than a traditional vantage would, suggesting fleshy and angular bodies that inspired complaints in my empty stomach. 

His head jerked up, dragging me from my focus and without thinking I twisted myself away from the window, jabbed my key into my carrel's lock, and slipped in. He was silent for a long time as I calmed my breathing and absently flipped pages. I brushed off the anxiety as the result of overeager snooping, an unusual voyeurism on a fellow student and researcher. He must be analyzing fiction of a bygone era or the language was only an addendum to some sort of religious study, an examination of medieval mysticism or something like that. I had jumped to conclusions and then been surprised when his research was not as expected. Being sly did not come naturally to me and it had titillated me in a surprising and captivated way. The sensation unnerved me and I tried to placed it behind me, but no amount of tea seemed to bring me back to my studies. I folded up my papers, slid them into their awaiting folders in the abinet, replaced my books on the shelf, and locked away my little monastic cell. My neighbor's door had been left just slightly open and against my better judgement I slipped in for just a moment and looked around. My heart leapt again to my throat, but the illustration was hidden again between covers, and the books were in various languages--one distinctly German, another two or three in Italian or Latin, but most entirely unknown to me. I noticed a small unmarked vial tucked in the bookshelf, containing several orange capsules. The absence of labeling set me off, though I am familiar enough with the contents. His bobbing made that much more sense. 

Considering my predicament in a briefly cleared mind, I slipped from the carrel and made my way to the stairs. I caught the small man at the corner of my eye, but prevented myself from any egregiously suspicious observation. He was Middle Eastern, maybe Indian, or perhaps Egyptian, and seemed overly small, as if trying to avoid attention by curling up into himself. He was a snail of a man, I decided then, carrying his stacks of books, his rightful shelter being the pages of ancient books, of times that he managed to understand better than this present. The University was large enough that we may never have crossed paths until that night and if it hadn't been for those paper thin walls I might have gone on blissfully ignorant of this man and his esoteric studies. But I doubt it. 

The way home was unnerving to say the least. The suspicion and anxiety other presences didn't dissipate and, upon reflection, became more intense as I made my way home. The nights were dark, that wintry dark that gobbles up the light in its amorphous starless skies. Somewhere above, the moon danced in the sky, infusing a sickly radiance in an ever-shifting formation of clouds while earthbound street lamps flickered a sickly yellow. The campus was suspended between the early tittering of youths and the boisterous return of those celebrants; they were somewhere, I told myself, enjoying the night far away from this particular route. All the time I felt shadows racing on all sides, encircling me and cutting off my escape and as I turned to face them, a lantern would flicker its sodium glow nothing unusual would be there; a flash of darkness and then the expected outlines of denuded trees and shrubs, walkways and banisters, ivy-covered buildings with shriveled leaves rattling in the night. I wanted to run, to lock the door behind me and turn on all the lights until this malignant mood passed, but I refused the fancy with all the determination I could muster wishing it away with clenched, pocketed fists. 

I was out of breath when I locked and bolted the door behind me. The entry light hummed it's fluorescence warmly and I stood, rubbing my shoulders with my hands, trying to shake off more than the cold. A deep-rooted scientism jostled and jarred with my sentiments, shriveling slightly at this undeniable confoundment. I put water on for tea, but only after letting the lights flutter gradually into life, banishing the shadows only too slowly. The entry light remained on, breaking the childhood habit of turning every light out as I passed; a habit that frustrated my quiet mother to no end, though she always affirmed the habit with a wavering smile. I placed a spoon slathered with honey into the tea pot, the water in the kettle stirring to life, and sprinkled loose petals and leaves of jasmine into their silver chassis. Trying to reconnect with my usual absentmindedness, I  opened the fridge--an old, polished Frigidaire I rescued from my grandparents' before my sister had the chance to give it to Goodwill--only to blanche at the notion of eating anything. My stomach churned restlessly, though the promise of tea and sleep calmed it once the door to the fridge closed. I flipped on the main room light--a living room and bedroom--and nibbled on dry, salty crackers from the cabinet until the water boiled, all the while watching the slow retreat of the dark. 

The arm chair wrapped itself around me as I set myself into it, an immense relief sloughing off as I sipped the still too hot tea, relishing the scalding floral sweetness on the end of it. The days in the library, of endless reading and writing and solitude had gotten to me; that was all. My fellow scholar was probably in the same boat, though our brief encounter suggested foreignness, even a limited familiarity with English given his abundant linguistic knowledge elsewhere. My progress on my own writing was substantial and I may benefit from a holiday, rejuvenating myself on more than stale or soggy sandwiches. I had lost weight--a common trend during periods of academic intensity--and allowed friends' calls to go unanswered. Tomorrow, yes tomorrow I would catch up, get a drink or just enjoy some sunshine--if that skulking sun ever showed its face again--and conversation over tea and coffee. I felt my appetite return, but let it grumble as a sort of vengeance on its earlier hesitancy. I thought of rich, swirling cream; a chai latté with a shame of nutmeg, cinnamon, and brown sugar; of the forgiving flesh of the baguettes served at that particular coffee shop, the buttery crumble of a scone at the other. I'll give myself a holiday and allow this little episode fade. 

Logic seemed to surface again as I considered the whole event with greater removal and objectivity. It all could have been a panic attack, the result of those upcoming papers and my poor preparation for handling them, or just some fear of actually finishing the dissertation... When was the last time I met with my advisor? He was out of the country until Wednesday, but we ought to discuss my progress shortly thereafter. It was all a conflation of forces, of the slow tides that I had refused to acknowledge. I had been taken up by a riptide, but was returning to a more comfortable ebb and flow. The waves lapped beneath me as I pulled them comforter over my shoulders, up to my chin, and dozed off. 

Saturday, January 28, 2012

More Thesis - Community, Meaning, and Geography

In Being Singular Plural, Jean-Luc Nancy describes how human communities, communities of knowing (abstract, practical, social, cultural, and so on) are where meaning exists. Meaning is not separate from human forms, rather human forms and meaning are the same thing (at least under certain circumstances) such that if we do not exist in human communities, we exist without meaning. (Also see Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue.) Steiner Kvale describes qualitative research interviews as a an "inter view," a sort of Gestalt image of two faces staring into one another that is also--though oddly not perceived simultaneously--a vase or candle stick. As we explore the territory of another's storied (his/herstory) experience, we undergo a flip of our own perception into the perception of another's. We cross between my view and your view of the world into an inter-view, where we have the potential to see, if briefly and fleetingly, the world as it manifests for another. What I am interested in doing with my thesis is exploring these perceptions of the world, concerning Flagstaff's current situation and future potential, its hindrances and opportunities, in order to lay out a sort of geography (I think of Borges's map in "On Exactitude in Science") of meaning in Flagstaff around staying and shelter. Ultimately, by acting as a traveler through this geography (both Kvale's and Borges's imagery) I can gather enough meaning from the different places to stitch together in exciting, novel, and structurally supportive new ways. Harry Boyte explains the IAF's relational meeting strategy and organizing imagery as a sort of "multiverse" of different world views. Though the multiverse notion has some advantages--the world IS perceived in radically different, even contradictory ways by different people--I find it deeply unsettling. If the butcher, baker, and candlestick maker (to return somewhat to the Gestalt image) all dwell in different universes perceptually--not to mention the mayor, governor, constable, farmer, miner, and so on--then how can we expect them to build a relationship? Their meaningfulness--the ways they constitute a community of meaning a la Nancy--is undermined by the radical separation of the multiverse. What Nancy suggests, then, is that regardless of the framing of pluralism (which is the goal of IAF's multiverse), the ability to corporate, to literally grow the body of meaning that a community requires to exist coherently, we have to stitch and suture and mend the broken fleshy pieces of ourselves to one another. MacIntyre begins After Virtue with a story of the loss of a meaningful method of science, of a dystopia where only pieces of scientific knowledge from various eras remain, but how they are meaningful--that is, the cultures and communities that produced them--has been lost. He argues that we reconstitute a society, culture, and tradition of philosophy--especially ethics--that will allow for a re-signification (the infusion of meaning) of ethics. I believe this is also Nancy's goal, and mine. We have remnants, pieces of a culture that don't meaningfully come together. There is a radical way in which any future culture that is coherent will be coherent in a cyborgian (Donna Haraway) or Frankensteinian way: It will be a deeply hybridized pluralistic meaning because we have been so deeply wounded and mended and reconstituted by the divorce we have experienced from the land, our families, our histories, our communities, and ourselves. That said, what I hope to uncover is some of the basic expectations, desire, and roles that will being the healing of ourselves to ourselves; that is, the reconstitution of meaning in an epistemologically, culturally, and environmentally ravaged world.

Wednesday, January 25, 2012

Thesis Musings

"Like Martin Luther King, Saul Alinsky spoke in what can best be called a 'prophetic mode.' The prophet is not an outsider: he or she stands ardently in a tradition, claiming its insights, charging that present-day activities, leaders, or the society as a whole are tarnishing or destroying its own best ideals. Prophets challenge certain traditions and values at the the same time that they invoke others. And the act of recalling the past for present-day action also transforms the traditions invoked, adding nuance and new dimensions. Alinsky had located his efforts in a dynamic democratic tradition that he argued represented the best values and spirit of the country. He had also sketched new strategies for effective poor people's organizing for power in a world where experts made the poor into dependent clients."
-Harry Boyte, Commonwealth

This striking passage suggests something profound about the prophets temporal vision: the prophet does not see the future as a radical break (i.e. revolution) between the present and the yet-to-be; rather, the future becomes an amalgamation of the best features of the past fused to, or reinvigorated by, and creatively multiplied in the immediate or near immediate present. The vision of the prophet is a perception of the present as an interpolated textured moment in which time apparently collapses in a sensual experience. This "prophecy" is not radically different from the present because it is the future, it is radically different from the present because it cuts to the root (which etymologically relates to radical) in a historical and communitarian sense (Ed Chambers, Roots for Radicals). Through this interpretation, sight, vision, prophecy is as much about the past as it is about the future in that the present is perceived as "close" to a real past critical excellence--easily romanticized or nostalgically narrated but by no means necessarily so--that shares a temporal proximity or collapsed moment with a preferred future potentiality--non-utopian but rich, valuable, and progressive (Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern). I read this as relating to a "beloved community" that bases action on the collective spiritual experience of a group. That experience is infused with a radical (i.e. rooted) relation around or into that community (a perceived movement of self into spirit, self into collectivity); a relation of each individual to the experience of the spiritual text, song, enactment, understanding, or practice (Charles Marsh, "The Beloved Community"). The religious event--however it forms and however many forms it takes--returns the experience of the participant to the root of the community, to the source of their collectivity in order to reconceptualize the group as one body, as a religious host, acting in one name (God's name, the spirit of community, the illumination or fire that is shared in all participants). Such identification liberates the community from its oppression in the present world--material, political, economic, even potentially cultural (in constructive or deconstructive ways)--and precipitates action by the group to act in one liberating struggle. Boyte goes on to mention that young social critics of the 1960s placed themselves outside of the culture. This gesture--likely overblown and definitely ill-conceived--would divorce these critics from the sustaining root needed to build community and culture capable of turning a tide of economic injustice and political oppression. In lacking a "root" to community and to history would prevent identification with liberatory collectivities and a critical prophetic vision--not simply a utopian one--that would bridge a vision of the past, present, and future in generative ways.

...

Now to write the rest of it and figure out where this fits.

Wednesday, January 18, 2012

Haiku & Tarot

A pair of dead foal
stare with eyes full of dry, clear,
& keen vacancy.

...

I wrote this on Twitter yesterday and I am still lingering on it. Perhaps it lingers on me. That is the way of things sometimes: we think we get to be the center with our thoughts and our friends and our places orbiting us. Then we get to be jarred by how we are in orbit ourselves, moving like moons round the beautiful and terrible objects of the world.

Well, I am orbiting around the pair of young dead deer I saw as I walked away from the county buildings where I intern. Why this is... there are many possible reasons, but I have latched onto one (I recall Sherwood Anderson's grotesques at the beginning of Winesburg, Ohio). I consider the Tarot, it's collection of symbols and roles that, for some, can be so filled with meaning. Divination is a hit or miss sort of game, but I think the deer force me to realize how we are always encountering the symbols of the Tarot and they are full of meaning even in our ignorance and arrogance and distraction.

The Death card, so often figuring into stories, can represent change, decision, loss, and novelty. I have been exposed or brushed along death more than usual and my life has taken on certain dynamic qualities of late. My mother's heart was stopped, her brain nurtured by machines, her digestion augmented by tubes, and her sternum sundered. In other times, in other cultures, with other technological situations there would be no question that she would not be alive now with all of that behind her. Of course, that was done intentionally, knowing that it might very well extend her life for ten years or more.

On the opposite end, I am blessed to be an uncle today. Oddly, little Vivie's birth came the day my mother was released from they hospital. Like my mother's condition, Erin giving birth was mediated by medicine and treatment. As a result, Vivie was a month early and remarkably small, though she has put on weight and increasingly adorable. Birth represents another sort of death, an inverse of dying and a departure from the comfort of the womb to the harshness of the world. Like my mither's chest, birth represents a sundering of a whole--the pregnant woman--into two--mother and daughter. In the Mountains and Waters Sūtra, Dōgen writes:

"You should understand the meaning of giving birth to a child. At the moment of giving birth to a child, is the mother separate from the child? You should study not only that you become a mother when your child is born, but also that you become a child. This is the actualization of giving birth in practice-realization. You should study and investigate this thoroughly."

The tension that remains for me is how my mother's life was mediated by mechanical and pharmaceutical means. Before her surgery, we drove to the hospital and I could see the anxiety rising in her already. I was tired from a late night and the sky was still dim when we left, but she wore those minute wounds of strained nerves. She had been up late, unable to sleep and determined to compete various tasks before surgery laid her low. At the hospital, the nurses and anesthesiologist poked and prodded to prepare her with an IV and the appropriate pre-surgery meds. The doctor ran late due to an early surgery at another hospital. The outlook was frustrating to say the least.

When I came back to the room, Mom was accompanied by a woman, the two speaking freely. This was a nurse with whom Mom had spoken on the phone often over the past week. She had provided information about the surgery and had spoken with a kind frankness that bolstered Mom despite various frustrations that seemed to stack inexorably on one another. We stayed with my mom for an hour and a half or more waiting for the tardy doctor and comforting my mom. When they took her to the OR, it was an immense relief. Later, I would learn that my mother was medicated such that all of that comforting and conversing had been strictly short-term and had been wiped from her thoughts by the end of the surgery.

Of course, with surgery such as hers, a little lost memory is not the only marking. All the same, my mother was going through all the stress that she would if unmedicated and I could not shake the absurdity of that experience seemingly snatched--if appreciatively so--from her. The way I saw her body sunken, sapped, and fundamentally infiltrated remains with me. Recovery was a process of liberating her from these life-sustaining, if horribly uncomfortable, paraphernalia. She was both herself and not herself, her body undergoing the radical change of initial violation and eventual liberation.

My mother was close to death, though not in a traditional way. Rather, her life brushed near the edges of what was tolerable. I was not struck with fear for her survival--though the possibility of complications had come up and been discussed--but I continue to be alarmed by how she cannot be the same person she was before. Of course she is my mother, but how her perception of self, the sensation of her body as the center of who and what she is has been radically upended. It is easy to think of ourselves as whole, as one solid being composed of bone, sinew, muscle, and flesh; electricity, hormones, and neurotransmitters; blood, thought, and relationships. With such moments as my mother's surgery, some of those bonds become weak, even insubstantial, and a great anxiety--potentially healing and generative it may be--seeps into the world.