Philosophy that Bakes Bread

Meditation: Wheel & Texture

2012-02-11T16:08:00.000-08:00

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.

Paper Thin Walls, Whole Story

2012-02-08T19:33:00.001-08:00

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+

Paper Thin Walls Pt 2

2012-02-06T21:04:00.001-08:00

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.

Paper thin wall, pt 1

2012-01-31T22:17:00.001-08:00

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.

More Thesis - Community, Meaning, and Geography

2012-01-28T16:40:00.000-08:00

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.

Thesis Musings

2012-01-25T12:26:00.000-08:00

"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.

Haiku & Tarot

2012-01-18T19:26:00.000-08:00

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.

Others' Dreams

2012-01-07T20:39:00.000-08:00

I find myself anxious concerning the dreams of others. Once, a woman sleeping next to me for the night dreamed of a bookcase falling on me and I woke her from her distress. She was fretting for my safety from an ethereal bookshelf, its weight and contents trapping me to the bed next to her. And now, my mother has fallen to sleep as I watch over her, while I engage in my own researches. I fear--strangely, even intensely--that her dreams will go beyond her control, that they may dwell on some pain or suffering or entrapment. When I wake her, what then happens to me in her dream? Do I remain contorted and broken, the life seeping out of me in dribbling increments?

Such neuroses are not new. Rather, they are well exercised muscles of my imaginary. Dreams have the power to create worlds and even, or so I am told, reveal something unseen in our own. I am hesitant to purchase such claims, but appreciate the notion they introduce. Indeed, it is this possibility that has seeded such subsurface terror in me, roiling as it is with notions of others' dreams. These are places where I--or my avatar--are guests, hosted by the peculiarities of women I have loved and scorned, women I have cared for and cared for me, women who know both my strengths and my weaknesses. And it is in their dreams that their concerns and--to be civil, allow me to say--dissatisfactions can find facile claim.

I have been dreaming abundantly of late: a bungalow I share with my father becomes overrun with cockroaches the length of my hand, my family strands me at an icey and abandoned North Sea coastline, my legs become entangled by serpents (snake-like, but tentacular and ichorous) that bolt me to the chair while impotent colleagues look on. These are the moderate nightmares of one who dreams too easily, too perspicacious of the creatures and stories he encounters. After all, these are the dreams of the dreamer and when I wake I know that I am gone from them, that my consciousness has abandoned that place it has created to indulge in private torments and subconscious fears.

What, though, of those men that are myself--or somehow represented by me--in the dreams of others? I cannot say that I have left them behind because I have never felt my consciousness there to begin with. Without waking the turning woman next to me, woud I have not continued to moan in her mind as my bones and skin lay torn and broken next to her? And the greater anxiety remains: What part has remained behind in that dream? How many of me have already been dreamed into suffering and death within the minds of others? What part remains when my own parent cries out at my torment?

These, I might be told, are the tremors of an exhausted mind. And such soothing would be accurate and even appreciated. When the earth shakes, certain objects once concealed are uncovered. I believe it is the same for the human mind.

My nerves quake not at the idea of crawling insects, hypothermic chill, or repulsive vermin; these are all the creatures of one's own making and one's own imagination. My quaking comes from the unimaginable things, the amorphous and putrescent forms that stir in our depths, and make contact in our fragile dream-state. What can a serpent's venom do but sicken, paralyze, and kill? It is that which dwells in the crepuscular region between our minds and the places beyond that terrifies me. In others' dreams, where I am only the passerby on the street, what waits for me as I fall from the brilliant cognizance of a friend or lover or family member? What maddening, indefinable malignance lies waiting to envelope and tear at the flesh of my semblance, to digest in slow aeons not my muscle and tendons but the psychic residue of my dreamtime passing?

Given the completeness, the seeming assurance of the reality of my own dreams, how can I deny that I am not just lounging in my ailing mother's mind? After all, it is not the visit to the store, the posting of a parcel, the telephone call of a friend, the cancelled trip to the cinema that I am here and now experiencing; those are but passing memories, stories I tell myself to explain why I am here presently. My mother's dream of me need not be that complete. I am but a young man sitting across from his mother who dreams fitfully, recovering bodily and psychically as medicines both treat and frustrate her. A pot of tea steams between us, it's bergamot aroma fills the air. Modest lamps keep out the winter's dark. Ha! She does not even require the stars to be lit for this particular scene.

It is all I can do to lift myself from this chair for I am bound by fear stronger than any demonic serpents. My heart races as I pour tea into my cup. I sip, my hand shaking and the tea cup clatters against the saucer, splattering outward. Several infinitesimal crystals of sugar dissolve at its touch and I sicken to think again of that encroaching night, that dissolution of the real--or at least the reality--into that formless entropic mass. My breath shudders and moans against the--once forgotten--asthmatic constriction in my lungs. I shake myself but the tension remains, suspended between ease and pain, nestled in this nerve racking middle ground.

I shake the nerves loose, letting my fingers waggle and relax. How absurd, all these nighttime anxieties, and only in my weakened state--stress from Mother's operation and recovery--would I allow anything like this entertain me. I sip again from my tea and it refreshes me, it slides with warm thick certainty down my throat and I think, for just a flashing moment, that it will go through me and root me to the floor of the lounge. I peek around the curtain and see the flickering stars of the night. Without thinking I am at the door and outside.

The air is sharp and I pull the door behind me to keep Mother from waking. The night is dark, its sky clearer than usual, and I feel armored against the brisk gust that encircles my nightrobes. Something accrid curdles the air, a smell like sulphur but so thick I can taste it on my lips. I peer into the darkness, step forward from the porch.

In the midst of the stride, I realize there is no step to catch me. Something does. Its hooked appendages latch onto me and for a moment I am cradled at the hungering edge of the world.

---

Just a story drawing from recent events and dreams. My mom is doing well and I have yet to be consumed by that which "gnaws hungrily in inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond time and space," despite fictionally descriptions to the contrary. This is also an attempt to use my new gewgaw for typing. For the most part it works delightfully well!

My Proposal Rewrite: Part II

2011-12-01T18:52:00.001-08:00

This is all taking on a different structure. I had intended to frame methodology or at least literature in greater context. The latter I have done to some extent, but not enough for the purposes of my thesis or proposal. In a certain way, I'm just writing. I am framing this writing in terms of my thesis, but how that works will remain ambiguous.

Notice that my footnote becomes, effectively, an endnote.

...

How can I make sense of this project? From where does it come? First, it is based on an assumption that a community knows best what it needs. Experts, many planners, and abundant economists would disagree with this statement. International development efforts have been and continue to predominantly be decided from outside. During my undergraduate education, a professor of mine—Dr. Deane Curtin—liked to share this story:

United Nations representatives went to a small village. They looked around and saw how the women were cutting trees and brush for cook fires. This was degrading the environment and allowing for soil runoff. The men from the UN said to each other, “These women need solar ovens, then they won't cut down the trees.” They then went back to the UN and petitioned for money, bought the solar ovens, and returned to the village. They showed the women the ovens, how they worked, and explained how it would save them time and resources. The women of the village inspected the ovens for a few minutes, then walked off. One of the UN representatives asked one of the women why they weren't going to use the ovens. She said, “We cook at night. We're too busy during the day.”

When “experts” proposed a strategy for improving their lives, they did not listen first. The same professor liked to share another story:

Students and I were traveling in India and we visited a village. The women were raising money to buy bicycles. The women explained how much they traveled from one village to another. Bicycles would free up some of that time. The next year, we went back just after the bikes arrived. These women in long saris were trying to hop on their bicycles as they raced down a hill because no one knew how to ride a bicycle. With the women's permission, the students jumped in, placed the bikes on flat ground, and gave two or three of the women lessons on riding a bicycle as they held the bikes steady. Those women then taught the others until all the women began to cycle on their own.

These stories provide two different narratives of development. As we transform—or transition—our communities toward sustainability, we can choose which narrative serves us. Will we listen to economists, politicians, engineers, and other “experts” or will we listen to our own community, requesting help on our own terms?

I have another story to share. Food justice scholar and activist Dr. Robert Gottlieb spoke at my school Northern Arizona University in the Spring of 2010. He had many exciting and enthusing stories of community gardens, local markets, farm-to-school programs, and other sites of just community development around food. I asked him something like, “Given that each of these projects is place-based and comes out of a particular habitat and cultural location, what—if anything—can we in Flagstaff learn from them?” Robert Gottlieb did not have an immediate response and after the conversation, Dr. Patrick Pynes approached me. He said, “I liked your question. You were asking, in a way, if these stories are useful for us here in high altitude American Southwest.” For those who do not know Patrick Pynes, his focus is on Southwest food systems and culture.

I left that meeting more critical of the utility of Robert Gottlieb's project than I know am. What I have learned is that these community enterprises—explored in detail in Food Justice, which he co-authored with Anupama Joshi—are important for others to hear. They do not provide models. What they provide are stories that inspire us, that we hear and can then contextualize to our own places and times. Through listening first, we begin to imagine with greater creativity, cleverness, and potential. That imaginary then expands into action.

Over Autumn of 2010, I was handed a great many conceptions of power. Paul Apostilidis has provided an intellectual capstone to this understanding of power. Antonio Gramsci describes hegemony as the mindset imposed—in the form of culture, politics, economy, and so on—onto a society that hinders or prevents thinking beyond that system of power. A quotidian example would be arguing for students trying not to fall asleep in class during a lecture by the professor; these students are not being served by the experience, but the school and the instructor are such that the potential actions for the students are limited (attention, doodling, sending text messages, napping, and so on). Apostilidis, through his examination of immigrant slaughterhouse workers and organizing in Breaks in the Chain, argues that this hegemony is constantly enacted. The students themselves refuse to break out of the dull, aimless, and forgettable classroom.

Apostolidis's next step is incredibly, even radically exciting: If hegemony is enacted by everyone, not just the institutions with/in which we participate, then we are presented again and again with opportunities to contest hegemony, wrest power from it, and even escape it. For Latino/a slaughterhouse workers,¹ this latent power is manifested with the slowing of the “disassembly line” to a human scale, such that beef stacks up in heaps all over the factory. When the managers try to regain control by leading some line workers out to be summarily fired, all the workers from that stage walk out together. When the managers try to chain the doors to keep the workers there, they then plainly state that they cannot be kept in, that they will break the windows if the doors are locked. First, the workers—organized and coordinated as the are—contest the power of the managers to set the pace of the line; then, they wrest power to terminate workers arbitrarily; and finally, they proclaim their ability to escape, to leave the factory altogether no matter the chains put into place. These workers have refused to participate in the hegemony of the factory.

I have introduced a concomitant concept to this discussion of sustainability: radical democracy. Apostolidis explores how his subjects—people who are simultaneously immigrants, workers, organizers, family members, Latinos/as, and so on—are reconstituting politics within their work environment. Hegemonic pressure has individualized these identities such that one worker's story is separated from another's, that collectivity is cut off from the workers. Through storytelling and listening, organizing and planning, action and reflection, these individuals begin to see one another as narrative subjects; by sharing narratives, their similar pains, pressures, and traumas become unifying and constitutive of a larger political body.

In a limited sense, sustainability does not require democracy, whether that democracy is radical or not. Sustainability, since first defined in a social-environmental manner in 1987, has predominantly meant using resources and natural cycles in non-depleting ways. As residents of planet Earth, we cannot afford to undermine the mechanisms that make our residency possible. This goal is obviously substantive and challenging. We are, in multifarious ways, farther from it than ever in the history of our species. We may approach such sustainability as technocrats or beneficent tyrants, setting in place strategies to reduce population, pollution, contamination, and habitat destruction from above such that our planet continues to be habitable by human beings.

This echoes sharply of the UN representatives deciding that women need solar ovens. In simple terms, we don't need solar ovens. We need institutions attentive to the needs of people and places. We need to listen to the lessons of place. Stories from other places are useful, but it is our own narrativizing that will produce the culture, institutions, and communities we need for sustainability. This is the artery (and all arteries have accompanying veins) from sustainability to democracy.

I will show how Flagstaff is already a community of alternative, attentive, generative stories. As I have previously said, these are not the current dominant stories of this place. We have stories—stories I hope are gaining traction—concerning food, education, citizenship, employment, and more. My aim is to attend to stories of housing. These stories will be reflective and historical as well as potential and “fictional.”

Let me share a story I have about housing. In February of 2011 I moved to a house in the Southside neighborhood of Flagstaff. This building has a history all its own: a lumbermill workers' union, a wedding chapel, a dance studio, a squat, and now it is a residence thanks to our peculiar landlord. The building has three flours, the basement and third floor act as apartments while the main floor has four individual bedrooms, a small shared kitchen, an uncommon single bathroom, and an expansive common room. My friend and previous roommate Tim Haynes moved in with me, so that we shared the space with two strangers.

Tim and I were immediately warmed by our new residence. It felt accommodating and comfortable after our six month stint in an apartment south of town. Our new roommates were generally easy going, though each with his own habits. Near the end of the summer—following the exchange of one of these roommates for another stranger—Tim and I engaged in some cleaning. We felt ambitious and proud of a reconfigured common space and consolidation of what we felt was cluttered, dusty equipment. Most of this was owned by our then-absent roommate. We saw the clean, expansive wooden floor and the openness of the rearranged furniture and looked forward to hosting friends in this crisp, breathable room.

Our absent roommate returned from a not especially pleasurable trip. He came in perturbed and agitated from his time away and the long sojourn back. He came in with a nearly finished six-pack in hand. He saw the new shape of the common room, his tidied and consolidated equipment; he did not like what he saw. What ensued was an argument for which I had little precedent. He began to argue, then shout, and eventually physically threaten me. Tim attempted to soften the engagement, but he had clearly focused his attention on me. My nervous laughter did nothing to ease his mood.

I do not think of myself as an especially vulnerable person. I am tall, broad, white, male, (generally) viewed as straight and receive various other wards of my person. I often carry a small Opinel knife, a gift from a generous host during a stay in St. Paul, Minnesota in January 2008. I was once temperamental, but have never been one for physical confrontation.

When my roommate threatened to break my jaw, I was so terrified I almost broke into tears.

Days later dust had settled, even if it settled onto eggshells. Many things happened in those interceding days. I continue to hold this episode against my roommate,as I think is wise, I understand a good deal better who he is and why this modest shift (what Tim and I exclusively viewed as an improvement) inspired such a dramatic episode. My roommate's concerns were not given any space (from his vantage) to surface, to enter a shared discursive space. Aggressive language—rarely physical aggression, I am told—is the means by which my roommate was able to bring these issues into a conversation. What we—as a household—needed was a safe space for each of us to share and confront these issues evenly and fairly. I believe we lacked anything like a political space for us to raise conflicts, expectations, and desires for our shared living space. I withhold forgiveness of what I feel was a breach of basic civility, but this episode will continue to inform me in terms of housing and personal safety.

This is a story I carry with me, a story that is part of who I am.

1One aspect of Apostolidis's project is to challenge the limitation of this terminology. He interviews these workers-organizers and listens to their immigration narratives, their histories, and their conditions to deconstruct a simple conception of immigrant labor and reconstruct these people as narrativizing subjects.

Where have I been? Where am I going?

2011-11-30T10:28:00.000-08:00

Well, thesis work and the trip to New York have taken up a good deal of my time. I have a story to write up about my visit to Zucotti Park/Liberty Plaza, but in the meantime, I am rewriting my thesis proposal. What follows is what I hashed together yesterday. Ideally, this is more organic than what friends and my committee have read and more likely to be researched successfully. This is also iffy depending on how it may or may not fit in with complimentary projects.

Wish me luck as the semester tidies up. I have two events this weekend, two papers due at the end of net weekend, a shindig I'm putting together next Saturday, and a month-long stay in Lincoln when the semester ends. Whew. Good luck to everyone else dealing with end-of-semester madness.

Addition: If you haven't noticed, I guess I am a "twit" or something now that I tweet. You can find me @HaikuBaker, and I have the widget here on the blog.

...

I have an idea. It is a little crazy and somewhat silly, but I have it and I can't get it out of my head. My idea has to do with housing ourselves. In short, I argue that housing cooperatives—also known as cohousing—are a better way to shelter ourselves than our current dominant resources. The reasons are many, more than I will hear touch on, but they are enough to act creatively and a little strangely.

We are not adequately served by our current housing. By “we” I mean we graduate students at Northern Arizona University; abundant overworked people in Flagstaff, Arizona; the clever and resourceful—though increasingly broke—youth across the United States; the people who have been swindled by an unjust banking system; and a nation of people struggling to create the homes they want. This service is not strictly economical. This economic disenfranchisement arose with political marginalization. The two are interlinked: Insecurity of residence prevents a political, environmental, or interpersonal appreciation and understanding of place. Before people can engage with where they are, they require a security and connection to that place.

This is the problem: If our communities are to be sustainable, economically independent, or resilient (all related terms), then the people of that community must be able to stay and invest in those places. This provides us with a definition of community: A group of people set in a particular place over a period of overlapping time in secure ways. People constitute meaning; collaborative work of those people—in active, generally nonconscious ways—builds culture in the form of shared experience. This experience is a function of shared time and shared space; collective experience produces stories that constitute culture. Security in this sense means that community members have legitimate claim to this place and time and will be able to continue participating there.

Housing in Flagstaff—and more generally—is inadequate in various ways relating to this elementary extrapolation of community. First, the people of Flagstaff are prone to transience for three immediate reasons: access to affordable housing, access to gainful employment, and a resulting “culture” of impermanence. Cost is affected by an abundance of second homes that inflate property values which encourages higher than average renting; both of which are non-resident ownership which do not support longevity in staying. Employment and savings are limited by too few jobs, a lower than living wage standard, specialized skills amongst the well-paying businesses available, and little accessible capital to fund novel enterprises. These conditions produce a “culture” in a contradictory way: the exception are those who can stay and the stories that propagate suggest staying is out of reach. These stories are built on the experiences of those who are capable of staying—who act as witnesses to others' departures—and undermine an imaginary that staying is possible or likely. In this way, the “culture” of Flagstaff is based on an absence of culture, it is an unculture where building reflective, generative community is restricted if not denied.

My research is interested in clarifying a vision of housing that allows Flagstaff to develop a more generative culture. Clearly, this enterprise is unwieldy. I bring to this project my own experience (graduate student), my own expectation (staying in Flagstaff), and my own aspirations (cohousing). I recognize that I am party with many other conspirators interested in more responsive housing in Flagstaff. Others have worked at great length on housing. With that in mind, I define my focus: What is the vision for Flagstaff's housing amongst its organizers, planners, and activists specifically engaged with this question?

With this question, I want to learn 1) what has been done and what is underway, 2) what barriers have limited success, 3) what can be done to encourage success, and 4) what is the vision of these individuals. To learn these, I must network with existing movers-and-shakers to learn, and hopefully embed myself within, this network. This is the preliminary work of my research. Then, with these key figures, I am interested in hosting an “envisioning” session modeled on the work of the Transition Movement. This exercise creates an imaginative space for encountering a future Flagstaff in which these projects have come to fruition. Participants create useful fictions around people and places that they believe will benefit the community. For the Transition Movement, this is about building a vision toward resilience, an ecological term relating to an ecosystem's ability to bounce back from trauma. This exercise reveals narratives around a positive future state, an aspiration and potential route to achieving that state.

My own vision is part of this, but it is part of a larger landscape of ideas. Assuming that my own project moves forward, it can be informed by others' experience, deal with similar obstacles, for which I ought to be prepared (even if that means first modifying or playing with the rules, codes, and laws). In addition, this can inform the party of conspirators of one another, of difficulties experienced, and develop strategic responses. This constitutes a second phase of research in which we develop tactics for realizing these fictions.

A final phase is project-based. It is about taking these insights, strategies, connections, and other resources into a generative phase. At present, this is the most vague and speculative. It will be informed by the first two phases. I bring my own conceptualizing of cohousing in the form of Resident-Owned Green Urban Equitable Housing, or ROGUE Housing; but I recognize that if I cling too tightly to such a vision, it will restrict the potential outcomes of the research process. I have considered ROGUE Housing a model for cooperatives, but if it survives in some form, it may be about changing the field and providing resources for others' aspirations. In a deliberate and necessary way, I must leave behind my own expectations to research wisely.

Votes are not Found on Supermarket Shelves: My Occupy Statement

2011-11-13T17:59:00.000-08:00

This is following reading Ethan Miller's "Occupy Connect Create," but also comes from research I did last fall for a paper on planning and community food security.

...

“First and foremost, ['the economy'] is a story. A story designed to stop politics, to shut down ethics, and to stifle our imaginations. 'The economy' is a way of thinking and experiencing the world in which our power and agency is robbed from us. In this story, the economy is portrayed as a massive, unified system, a thing that we’re inside of that is animated by specific 'laws' and 'logics.' It is for others to deal with, manage, or fix, and we are to simply follow their commands. We’ll vote in the next election for someone to tell us, after consulting with the experts, what we must sacrifice, change, or accept in order for the economy to get growing again. 'Democracy' is the name for all the minor tinkering we’re allowed to do inside the space in which this economy has us locked.”

- Ethan Miller, Occupy Connect Create

A few weeks ago, NAU's Philosophy in the Public Interest held a conversation on Occupy Wall Street. A comment was made--one often published in various forms by various people--that whatever occupiers are protesting against, whatever they are occupying for is something that we have all bought into, all participate in. From my socks and underwear, to my hat or school books, to my truck (for those who don't know, I have a truck) and my bicycles, my television and computer and Hulu and furniture andandand are all elements of my own participation in an economic system. This system is often referred to as "the economy" or The Economy. Everything that you put money into is a vote for something. This position is most apparent in the organic/sustainable/local/just/slow food movement, that you "vote three times a day" or "vote with your dollars."

I disagree.

Not only do I disagree, I heartily disagree.

A profound misunderstanding takes place when someone thinks that where their dollars go is the same as expressing support. My roommate is eating a dinner of Ramen noodles. Tim is an intelligent (and pretty healthy) young man. What he worries about is his wallet, his debt, and his upcoming expenses; he is more concerned with money than his health. Of course, he is not alone in this concern. I've met enough young people who would be happy to trade in all future packets of Ramen noodles for adequate whole grains, fresh fruits and veggies, hearty beans and nuts, (for some) rich cheese and yogurt, fresh eggs, and (some others) lean cuts of meat. The problem is not that these are unavailable on supermarket shelves--which is the case for those in "food deserts"--but that they are unaffordable.

Now, many of the recent food documentaries are happy to highlight that on a calorie-per-dollar ratio, Americans get a big bang for our buck. King Corn goes so far to interview the architect of this "abundance," Earl Butz. Unfortunately, these foods are like Ramen noodles in that they are cheap energy packed in with plenty of additives, especially salt and sweeteners, and devoid of nutrients. In short, when we eat this food product (a Michael Pollan term) we aren't getting what we are supposed to from food: vitamins, minerals, and micro-nutrients; community, connection, and gustatory satisfaction generally stay clear as well.

If we want a just and healthy food system, we can't start with a supermarket. Democratic change cannot be bought at Safeway and definitely isn't found on aisle 13 at Super Target. I can find cheaper baking soda at Target, but I won't find a participatory economy or politics in the cereal aisle. And you know what, I still don't care that General Mills has changed the shape of Hamburger Helper noodles and reduced packaging and therefore saved money on shipping to boot. That's greenwashing and worse, I think it is bull shit. These are company and institutions that have no interest in fostering a polis where your vote counts more than their dollars.

And while I'm on a tirade I'm not interested in another "wave of progressive politics." What I want is a serious political discourse that is based on the interests of an informed and invested populace. Yes we disagree and yes there are climate change deniers and yes there are far too many people in this country that think "the end is extremely fucking nigh," or putting a bullet in a doctor is sometimes okay, or think loving someone just might be worth complete and utter condemnation. Yes I am deathly concerned about those people and those positions. I have to hope that those are niches. What I'm really concerned with is that there are people in power who think it is a pretty good idea to drive most of this country head first into an environmental, economic, and political cesspool. I do mean an environmental and an economic and a political cesspool because the degradation of our supporting landscape goes hand in hand with the recreation of the Great Depression as well as the institution of an enriched political elite. And those "elites" aren't teaching in universities, working in publishing, or doing climate and ecological science.

Here's the constructive part: We aren't going to "buy" a new economy just like we aren't going to "buy" a different politics, we're going to dream and build and grow it. We're going to make it up out of the crazy creative power of being miners of the real, at excavating the future in every deliciously hardworking day of our lives. We will uncover more than we thought would ever be possible. We will see people organized in weird new constructive ways, new policies grown from strangely interconnected people that gets things going, we'll identify problems no one now alive has thought about and respond to them en masse. (I say "respond" because solutions and ignorance is for politicians, in the future none of us will be what we mean by politicians and all of us will be what we will mean by politicians).

There's more! We've got new stories to tell but they are all our stories! Our kids will wake up (that is, become enlightened) to this crazy open-ended world, a world where they want to work but no one is telling them "go get a job" because they are going to dream up livelihoods somehow hybridized between their dreams and the stories their elders will tell. Our children and our children's children will do the impossible. Every generation ought to make something made impossible by the previous. They will find rivers in the geologies of the future, burdening their banks with stories and creativity and generosity. And they will bring up earthen cups of it and we will drink and wonder why we stopped digging out the future and left it to our children. We will smile big wide old-people smiles and be glad that our children are beautiful, brilliant, healthy, adventuresome, and healthy people. They will be well and wealthy, wealthy in the world in ways too many have forgotten.

Those who want something new aren't after different politicians or fairer businesses or environmentally sensitive corporations or accurate news media. We don't need and I don't want pleasant versions of the same shit. It'll still be shit. We have been told the politicians and businesses and television personalities make the world. They don't make the world, at least not for much longer. We do. We the People make the World. We. The People. The World. These are capital realities.

The stories the People tell make the world. We are telling new stories and making new worlds out of them. Finally We are making up the worlds we want to live in. It may take some time for the politicians and the merchants and the priests/rabbis/clerics, the teachers, farmers, manufacturers, andandand the rest to catch up, to listen to the World--Our World--and to taste and smell the World, to touch it with our hands and it will touch us on our cheeks, lips, the smalls of our backs, the arches of our feet... We can't invest (either at the market or on Wall Street) in this world, we have to use our generative imaginative human capacities--building, growing, cultivating, fostering, narrating, cooperating, singing, playing, loving...--to make it and, after that, make it happen every day after.

Haiku & Time

2011-11-02T10:55:00.000-07:00

Time is being especially elusive and peculiar. I am getting a better sense of who and where I was last year. My hard days come up and I wonder how I managed to survive last year. Everyone around me seems to feel safe enough to express how overwhelmed I was then. Strange, no one spoke up then--not loud enough, anyway--when I should have heard it. Every month is a little trying and I'm falling back on my folks more than I'd like. Life is a continuing experiment and I hope to learn a good deal from it.

Here is some data:

[10.16.2011]
The apple softens
& becomes vibrant amidst
its rot & decay.

Petrochemical
ghosts wafts & snag along
material paths.

Water runs like milk,
thick in the town's veins; tins &
bags aimlessly flutter.

[10.17.2011]
Leaves gather in our
pockets, our valleys, blessings
for the next season.

Drops of water play
rhythmically, tonally;
raining down music.

[10.18.2011]
Leaves whisper, sing their
sabbath hymnal, preparing
for Winter's repose.

Walnuts have fallen
secreted in soil & stone;
hungry, but patient.

A blanket of earth
& sawdust to warm & calm
fierce detritivores.

Shadows wake in trees,
descend & swoop, become form
in one seamless breath.

Green irridescent
fly visits, but is mute to
my ignorant ears.

A practice stirs in
autumnal sunshine, once half-
forgot, remembered.

[10.20.2011 (?)]
A soft pressure weighs
on eyelids, bones, fingertips;
forms pressed into sand.

Sunshine play on me,
with an intoxicating
syrupy sweetness.

Leaves crackle under-
foot, each a small spectacle
of fiery grace.

[10.21.2011]
Honey-colored leaves
patter one another, &
play briefly in flight.

The ground rumbles with
the weight of burdened beasts
wheeling on worn tracks.

[10.23.2011]

Iron turned blood-red,
share an odd kinship with these
hands: worn & wounded.

[11.1.2011, on Stuart Kauffman]
Kingdoms of hybrids
intermarriage makes strength from
strange, diverse richness.

A memory of
home echoes in genes; forgot
but now remembered.

Dionysus &
Apollo play discordant
songs in flute & lyre.

Breath traces a wing,
one of innumerable
improbable forms.

A voice in forum:
raised as chitter, growl, twitter,
chirp; a leaf rustles.

Revolution, names
—Kepler, Darwin, Haraway—
unhinge & refocus.

Multitudes abound
(animals, plants, fungi, cells)
from simplicity.

[11.2.2011]
Distant snow falls; I
hear echoes of the silent,
numerous descents.

Reflections on "Implementing Sustainability"

2011-10-17T12:18:00.000-07:00

One of my courses has us write regular "participation notes" about our readings. Here's mine for class today. Page citations are for Kevin Wilhelm's Return on Sustainability.

...

Participation Notes - Returns
Caleb A Phillips
Course – Professor

Sunday, October 16, 2011

I'm not going to hand over th assignment you're after. I can write pages on sustainability initiatives, but I'm already doing that with other projects I'm working on. What I'm writing on is a confusion around sustainability that produces a sustainability lite. Businesses around the world can take on sustainability initiatives, they can save money on transportation through video conferencing or reduce packaging while making more of it recycled or biodegradable. These are projects that many businesses can do and learn from. What many can't do is become sustainable in a meaningful way.

The reading refers to Michael Braungart and Bill McDonough. In their remarkable book, Cradle to Cradle, they do say that we must turn industrial production on its head and capture the innumerable technical nutrients that are lost when we through things away. Waste does equal food (36). They also remark that sustainability, that cradle-to-cradle manufacturing can't be done in part, in must be done in its entirety or else we are simply delaying the industrial collapse. Certainly this process can be accomplished in stages, but how can look to Lockheed Martin for sustainability guidance (29)? This is a company that builds jet engines and missiles. Where exactly do tactical missiles fit in with sustainability?

In addition, there seems to be only a very shallow assessment of sustainability in these examples. If a business moves to replaces CRT monitors (conventional, boxy monitors) with sleek new LCD monitors, that makes hundreds if not thousands of pounds of electronic waste out of functional equipment (31). Replacement strategies without employing reuse (fixing and handing off monitors to low-income schools or community centers, for example) strategies or a comprehensive e-waste management scheme is foolhardy. Electronics and especially computers involve heavy metals and toxic chemicals that, without proper disposal, can contaminate ground and surface water supplies. Even existing e-waste programs may mean simply shipping computers off to other countries where they are picked through in unhealthy conditions (even landfills and by children) for the previous metals that are worth relatively more than they do in the United States.

And citing Hamburger Helper's packaging? Hamburger Helper is a nutritionally lacking food, high in sodium, and aimed at complementing cheap meat (33-34). Should we really be complementing a business that puts 30% or more of daily recommended sodium in a single, adult-sized serving (http://www.coheso.com/nutridata/Hamburger_Helper/list_item.html)? What does it say that sustainability for these uncritical assessments ignores a healthy diet of fruits, vegetables, and whole grains for a dish of cheap meat, salt, and simple starches?

What I'm getting at is that sustainability isn't something businesses can tack on or even innovate toward. Sustainability requires a much deeper assessment of sourcing, procedures, and goals in a social and environmental context. What these little blips about various businesses do sound more like greenwashing that real evaluations of what the business does and how it makes its money. If sustainability mean putting Lockheed Martin out of business, I think that is what sustainability—even for businesspeople—ought to mean. If Kevin Wilhelm thinks that sustainability is simply a change in sourcing or an update in electronics, then he is profoundly mistaken.

A wandering heart

2011-10-15T22:07:00.001-07:00

Krysta was teasing me, though not as much as I tease myself, for what I referred to as my wandering heart. I have a tendency to become enamored. I see wit and charm and a clever smile and, well, I see it. Krysta has recently accepted a maxim that "love is pain," an equation that has set her own heart at ease. Love, I suppose, has treated her with no great gentility. She loves no less than I do. She seems to approach the day with love, to send it out in lolling waves. Often it comes back her way, but sometimes with greater turbulence than desired.

I do not think of love as pain, except in the way that love can develop as attachment, and like any "good" Buddhist, I understand that attachment eventually produces suffering. (Though I like to reflect on "attachment to attachment" as just as prone to producing suffering as more obvious forms of attachment.) Krysta's radiating love is reinforced, even encouraged by her new understanding of "love is pain." Earlier tonight she did something between chiding and cautioning me because of my delight in amorous sentiments. To her, "love is pain" and therefore these little affections are just a road to suffering, that even the company of such compatriots will become painful. I don't find this to be true.

A wandering heart, that's what it is. I am happy to love, to receive a sharp-toothed smile and lend out music, literature, film. I let my love follow rivulets--the shores of which are marked with lends and gifts--out into the world and appreciate where they might come back and where they might go on to intersperse with others. I have taken to thinking of myself as a menace of sorts, letting these streams out into the world that might precipitate unpleasant circumstances. These little reflective condescensions, I suppose, are intended to keep me in check but don't really change much of anything. Rather than a maxim, I temper myself. I have lost more than one book and more than one DVD to a romantically inclined favor, and what scars do I have to show for it? My scars are more to do with bike accidents than misguided affection.

In senior year I was told by more than one friend that our place was the most comforting, welcoming place to be. It felt increasingly like a loving place, an open and warm and generous place. Gift-giving--lends and favors I group in with gifts, though they are temporally bound--is about creating a generous environment, a hearth around which wandering hearts might warm themselves, recuperate, reflect. I may be making myself into a menace, an affection fiend, but it is a posture that makes sense to me. Loving is more about giving, about being, about virtue and character to me than it is about physicality and gazing through darkness at one another.

In "Buddhism and Civil Rights," David Chappell (not the other Chappelle) writes, " Compassion is often considered an emotion in the West, but in Buddhist tradition it is presented as an insight: once we have seen that we are related to others, that we are the same kind, we develop a sense of kinship and kindness becomes an expression of this insight in action." I have been talking about love, but this sense of compassion makes a good deal of sense to me with regards to love. Whether that love is romantic, amicable, familial, or more general (Civic or global love? That sounds too vague to my ears.), we end up with a giving out, a mindset or lens out onto the world that ultimately shapes how others perceive the original viewer. I look out with love, looking for love, sending out love; my heart wanders in the world and I am happy enough to learn what comes following it back to me.

Reflections on Conflict

2011-10-14T09:57:00.001-07:00

It still seems funny to me. Tim and I moved in and the three (really, the four) of us didn't know each other any better than Tim and I when we moved in to the apartment last summer. I hadn't thought much of it. I was more worried about the unknown roommate. But when you left for a while and we did some cleaning and some rearranging of the furniture, it was not what you expected. You thought it was an indication of our low regard for you, that it was some deep-seated disrespect. I admit that it was disrespectful, but just in the shallow sense, the way someone turns the corner without signaling. But that is a big disrespect and a regular concern for a cyclist riding alongside. I think you felt like a cyclist, the terrain and behavior changing suddenly. It didn't help that you came off of a rough trip.

Afterward you seemed to have cooled and I seemed to understand your vantage better. Unfortunately what you were asking you weren't willing to give. Respect is never a one-way road--not that I know of any one-way roads in terms of people--and you seem to expect to see something you don't practice. I remember wondering how people might jump from sports to parties to the night after to family and still have it all in there, all in their life and in their head. It boggled me. Those were things, practices, behaviors I didn't know. I spoke with Becca on the way back from Sarah and Matt's farm; she said that what they were doing--farming--was so crazy and great and miraculous to her. I agreed. What Becca had trouble seeing was her own delicate magic of pastry making, the pleasant rituals of gelato. Where one saw magic the other saw the quotidian.

That's where we are, I think. What you do in terms of work and management is really something. I can see that and appreciate that. I most certainly respect the challenge you've set for yourself. That said, you drive me up the wall with complaints about money or difficulties because their sources are obvious to me. Flagstaff is not a town for juice and smoothies most of the time; selling such goods--regardless of their quality--is a fool's once the frosts start coming. We might get weird late-fall summertime days, but last week we got snow and next week it might average in the 40s or 50s. This is where you are living and it seems foolhardy to complain about it.

Despite that respect, despite that appreciation, you are obviously not interested in practicing that which you demand. Without practice I don't know if what I do or who I am makes a difference. I could push and I could make space, try to connect through the depression, anxiety, and frustration you experience, but why would I? You have made so little effort to make it feel worthwhile and one bad day seems to undermine any successes made in the meantime. There is a lesson in this, a lesson about how we build bridges and how we tear them down again; about the scorched earth we sometimes leave in our wake. But forest fires and lava flows bring out new growth. One can always find green sprouts the year after such devastation, not to mention the abundant mushrooms feasting on the boon. If I thought you would be in my life in some capacity in the years ahead, I might try. As it is, I see so little topsoil, so little humus worth cultivating that I leave you alone and I make a point that you leave me alone. A chipped bowl, cluttered kitchen, loud chatter into the night, a bike sitting squarely in the middle of the entry, these are sometimes the cost for what I have now and what I feel I must wrest from what you would otherwise take.

And yes, dammit, that is my lamp.

Hey! It's a Bread Recipe; also, School

2011-10-12T08:06:00.000-07:00

I made my first yeast bread in sometime for class yesterday. Julia asked for the recipe, so I already had it typed up. It was something like:
1 & 1/2 cup wheat flour
3/4 cup white flour (more to balance)
1 Tbsp yeast
1 tsp salt (put salt on opposite side from yeast)
1 & 1/2 Tbsp cinnamon
1 & 1/2 Tbsp brown sugar
3 Tbsp butter
Mix well (I did most the work in my food processor) and add enough water to make a soft dough. Turn out and knead until smooth (didn't take long after the whirring of the processor), shape into a loaf and place in a small pan. Cover and let rise for about 45-60 minutes, start oven preheat to 350 F. Before baking, drizzle with a little bit of honey and sprinkle oats on top. Bake for 18-25 minutes, once firm enough, flip out of pan and bake on the rack for 3 minutes.

The flour may be a little off. I just used what I had of the wheat. My bread pan was also the smallest one I had, so don't expect a big loaf in a large bread pan.

...

I used my food processor (new to me) in memory of making ridiculous quantities of focaccia and breadsticks for the Greens' House/ILS House Progressive Dinner back in junior year. I was on my feet for about eight hours, first baking and then hosting because nearly all of my housemates vanished. It was also one of the few identifiable times when I was really angry at someone, but it seems sort of funny thinking about that whole day coming together the way it did. Oof, I even had to do the dishes afterward. We had rounds of rather airy focaccia in the freezer for sometime. That was a nice outcome. I need to go grocery shopping and afterward, I may just make more bread.

My class with Rom Coles has yielded some really fantastic--if stupidly rushed--reading material. Like Marshall Ganz's "Why David Sometimes Wins" and right now we're reading J.K. Gibson-Graham's A Postcapitalist Politics which is pretty fantastic. I really want to pick up Young's Justice and the Politics of Difference which read in a week last year for David Schlosberg before he hightailed it to Sidney. What a loss for the school. I wrote a pretty solid paper for him and Jim Sell on grassroots food justice activism and urban planning if folks want me to post that. If you can't tell, I rather enjoy having found so many interesting readings available for free; I am growing weary of my computer screen, though. Anyone want to buy me an iPad or Nook? I swear I'll only use it for .pdfs, not real books I would rather show off on my bookshelf.

Haiku - Class (8.31)

2011-09-02T10:25:00.000-07:00

Where does one go to
find - learning, dreaming, knowing -
spaces of others?

An effortless dream
arises from the now spoilt
fruit of our labors.

See the stone in hand,
& tell me if it is sword,
wall or hearth you see?

Crow sees the stone wall
but does not see a stone wall.
See what Crow can see.

Strange seeds germinate
into foreign cultivars
enlivening place.

The children tear down
the rusted gate, and thrill at
more fragile fences.

A spark ignites flame
extinguished by a raindrop;
each filled with powers.

...

Returning to class has been strange. Somehow it feels more unusual than coming back to school a year ago. It is not that I am ill-prepared, I feel rather appropriately prepared, nor is it exactly anxiety or foreignness. I can't place it. I want to be working on my thesis and a rigorous schedule of class ought to align my time to actually get to work, so a return to class is good. That said, I am still out of my element in some manner.

I wrote these in Rom Coles's Power and Radical Transformation. With the form, I am still hesitant about past tense and whether that dangling "ed" counts as an additional syllable. More training in poetry might have been helpful, but I am of the opinion that generally it does not. We are expected to respond to the class discussion over a few pages and I think I will begin with these. I especially like "Crow sees..." and think that it reflects well some of the lessons to be learned from the article in a whimsical way. Again and again we revisited how to see transformational, radical work and how do we engage the opportunities of changing the "rules" of the game. Oddly, this is a subject of the Vincenzi story as well, or at least the understanding of the rules and the misunderstanding of such rules.

Anyway, I have to go reinstate my health insurance.

Cosmic Brownies

2011-08-23T10:12:00.000-07:00

I've been meaning to post this. Krysta and I made Cosmic Brownies (she insisted on the name) which were a delightful scenario and less of a challenge that I might have expected. When I wanted to make brownies for Miss Amanda Iris's return to town, I looked up "damn good brownies" and came up with this. I adapted the recipe, first by mixing in peanut butter blended with cream cheese which I simply threw in, though it may work best to melt and smear on top. The second adaptation was kind of more fun. Here is the recipe:

Cosmic Brownies
Wheat-free, no butter (not vegan, we included eggs)
Makes a lot of brownies and can can be sensibly split in half.

Preheat oven to 325 F

1 c cocoa powder
2 & 1/2 c white rice flour
1 tsp salt
Sift together. Set aside.

4 eggs
3 bananas, brown or frozen for easiest consistency
8 oz peanut butter
8 oz apple sauce
2 tsp vanilla
Blend together until smooth in a mixer, gradually add in dry ingredients. Mix for 3-5 minutes.

2/3 - 1 c dark chocolate chips
Pour into 2 greased 9x13 cake pans. Sprinkle chocolate chips evenly over the batter. Bake for 20-25 minutes. Note: You can make them thicker and cakier, which will definitely take longer time. We were both surprised how quickly these baked.

Writing Circle (18 August)

2011-08-22T13:11:00.000-07:00

These transcriptions or somewhat delayed, but here they are. This is from a writing circle on Thursday. If you were unaware, I've been thinking often and writing regularly on the Vincenzi story. If you are just now visiting my blog and are from the writers' circle, welcome and I hope you enjoy yourself.

...

First Prompt: "I've had something to tell for a long time."

Sabeen came into the shop after almost no sleep. Her girlfriend had kept her up in the worst way. The aroma of yesterday's roasting hung in the air effecting her like a tonic. The night had been long but the morning promised to be short, even a blessing if she let it. She had not started but caused a rebirth, an unpleasant renaissance the night before. She had said, "I've had something to tell for a long time," and Sam had quieted down like a mouse caught in the stares of twilight. Her tone - it is always tone - had been painfully uncertain, but definitively unhesitant. Now though, there was only certainty. She knew the moves, the quiet morning dance of checking the drawers, the mugs, the shelf of leftover baked goods all wrapped for day-old discounts. And it all felt just that much sharper, jittery and faintly painful from lack of sleep and unresolved sentiment. She had begun that way and Sam was quiet as a mouse. They both were for longer than they ought to be. Their relationship had never been one of words, always one of actions. A dance interspersed by tones either fiery or warm. Never were they cold, just hot and dangerously hot. Sabeen filled the mill with the beans roasted the night before, the bottom-most still sultry and welcoming. She thought they must slumber there, rest all together in quiet, innocent joy. She wondered what that was like. It had evaded Sam and her, the two taken to more hazardous comforts. Sabeen had, breaking the long, creeping silence spoken first. Sam had been waiting through the painful silence for the words, for the tone, for the shift in their movements. Sabeen had explained as best as words allowed, what she wanted. With the mill running, she slipped her hand into that warm undercurrent of roasted beans and loved it, loved it with an unadulterated certainty. The beans didn't argue - though they might keep her up - and were nearly always patient. She had tried to speak of patience [end]

Second Prompt: Take the last line of the previous write, include three colors observed outside.

Her mother had tried to speak of patience. A woman who had never acted with quiet or reflection or even much experience spoke of patience. Alecia preferred the weird certainty of the dark, of hidden spaces and the secrets that might remain so (I think I intended "might be revealed") or might remain enshrouded despite being inches from them. The black, the shadow, the slip of stealth not of darkness but of others' refusal to see. Her mother had always acted like lightning, like the white hot electric current. She coursed through a room like a wave, causing hair on men's necks to rise, cheeks to flush, and women to whisper. Not of secrets - where Alecia was certain were black - but of lies which were brown. Brown. Brown was both a blessing akin to secrets, akin to the miracles of soil and emergent life, but also of shit or waste. Alecia knew, despite growing up in the city where such things are preferably kept from young girls' eyes, that shit awlays held growth, fertility, life. Lies, she though, must hold that same necessity of emergence, of potential. Lies were carriers of nonsense but also of creativity of something birthed into existence - sometimes quietly and sometimes with dire cacophony that never managed to vanish again. Lies took what wasn't and made them what was. Isn't that the miracle of soil? That in the black patient dark dwelt a nothing, a no-thing that may just - given enough time and enough madness - may shatter the surface into solar brilliance. Her mother - all light and fluidity - had created dark. In that nothing that secret, sat a quiet, certain starlight. [end]

Third Prompt: "No I won't tell your story."

My heart beats crazy
Not any sense or order,
just now now now now.
(Originally written with commas on the last line.)

You have spoken with
the same words, saying nothing
but me & me &

Where am I left now?
With your hate, your anger, that
does not stop with me.

You threw my chair out,
but that was not me or mine;
it was you, I think.

My room, my doorway,
with you & your fist in it;
& thunder ends us
(The semicolon was absent in the first draft. This is also when a catastrophic weather even "happens" during the prompt.)

When the rains came in
& swept away furniture,
what did our words mean?

The door crashed in, the
window shattered, & I
thought it was you.

(Rewritten for appropriate structure:
The door crashed in, the
window shattered, & I thought
you'd come back again.)

Lightning split the roof,
burned the earth, turned air between
us into ozone.

After the water
cleared, our bodies in macabre
embrace, flowers bloomed.

I am left with my heart still beating but feel that healing & calm are beginning in me. What is shit & what is black earth?

Final Prompt: "The feather fell from the sky" (or something like that)

It fell from the sky, whispering in movement, without a bird in the sky. I thought of wise, trickster Rave & of the God-King Horus. The Swan of midnight & of spirit, of royal & unattainable brilliance. Then, there was the eye, the eye of Peacock (originally "the peacock"), innumerable and all-seeing. It was this feather, the father or mother of these feathers, the Platonic ideal of "feather." It was all & it was nothing. Which bird flies with such a feather? Which struts? Which sings?

...

Note: I have been contemplating short story-style character sketches for various characters involved with Vincenzi. These are mostly to allow me a greater understanding of the people I am dealing with. Sabeen and her coffee shop - called Araby - are important in the story and Alecia - who befriends Alecia during her visit - will become integral in future plots concerning these characters. The haiku are about conflicts with one of my roommates, something I had attempted to set aside for the evening but came up immediately with the prompt. In other news, I have been fumbling through a few chapters of Vincenzi and may just yet hit my draft deadline if I keep at it.

...

Edit, Post-Script: I recently had a conversation with - how shall I say... - the inspiration for the haiku. For those in the know, this was a positive conversation that required some waiting out before having. It was a relief, but one that was obviously on its way as of two days ago or so. This is good news and I want to thank those who have been attentive and supportive.

Update - Vincenzi

2011-08-17T09:28:00.000-07:00

Following a small Google search, I came across this, which suggests that though some novels are as short as 60,000 words and some as long as 520,000 words, most first novels that publishers look at range from 80,000 to 120,000 words. With that in mind, the draft of Vincenzi is hovering just shy of 90,000 words. I still have material to cover - though I am going to be close to the end of the month deadline I set for myself - and a good deal will be cut or integrated elsewhere in the book. (Most obviously, I am going to likely pull apart the introduction and put pieces of it elsewhere, such as allusions in pre-dinner conversation between Vincenzi and his father.) At this point, it will likely end up around or over 100,000 words and smack in the middle of the "average" length.

To do this, I compiled the separate chapters and checked the properties for word count. This is also the first-step for me to request editor and proofreader input. Considering that I started this at the end of March 2010, some serious revision is in store. I am still interested in finding people who would help me slog through the draft - or sections of the draft as I hope Miss Becca continues to do - and make it workable. If the past two months have been any indicator, I could potentially work on a follow up story draft by the end of next summer, something I have began framing last summer.

I am increasingly enamored with these characters and have been looking for and listening to their voices intently for the past several months. I have little interest in leaving them alone after assembling this first draft. Roommate and friend Tim recently received a several chapter chunk to read through at his leisure which I hope proves entertaining. Tim has commented a few times that he thinks this fusion of pulp detective and pulp horror makes me some sort of literary aficionado. I am not in agreement. Mostly I think of this as an exercise in my own geekiness, in linking two genres that have a parallel history of birth, popular success, and quiet integration into other media and genres only to more recently undergo a renaissance. The most obvious example I've come across is Shadows Over Baker Street, a purportedly uneven collection of stories fusing Sherlock Holmes with Eldritch Horrors (a la Lovecraft).

That said, and as I have said before, I don't think of this as a simple story. I have arranged various clues in the text to lead into future stories that develop a world and meta-plot focused on language, power, control, and rebellion. This is in part steeped in my reading into the Occult care of the late Kenneth Grant who has taken the Cthulhu Mythos very seriously in his exploration of extracosmic forces, magic, and global paradigm shifting. Increasingly his arguments are integrated into the characters capable of pulling the strings behind the action. One particular subject of interest is the Aeon of Maat which is also described as the Wordless Aeon in Outside the Circles of Time. Not to mention that starting to write Vincenzi came out of encountering William S Burroughs (incidentally, the name is partially integrated into the character Cranston Murlough) and his notions of nova outlaws and word viruses. These are, to me, the ideal constituents of a (not the) contemporaneous interpretation of Lovecraft and the words of power - especially black speech - that literally and figuratively riddle his work.

Finally, there is the common role of apocalyptic literature, a fascination of mine since I was probably ten or eleven. Apocalyptic literature has been part of the narrative human experience for most of the history of civilization. Note that I definitely doubt apocalyptic genres as being part of Paleolithic and likely Neolithic experience and culture. What I affirm is that human history is replete with attempts to define the end of the world in some form; that is, we are looking around the corner and seeing the dawn of a new age at the expense of the current. We live as much as ever in a revolutionary period and similar to the story "The Year of the Jackpot" and one of the speakers in Waking Life, this may come to some sort of head. Vincenzi is one way or articulating a story about such revolutionary and, yes, apocalyptic change and psychic evolution that is so crucial to Kenneth Grant's writing.

Haiku - Hopi Reservation et al.

2011-08-16T12:35:00.000-07:00

Rusted stone made sharp
by distance softens to small,
infinite detail.
...
A waterway left
stagnant, remains a blessing
in this bereft place.
...
Time peeled away -
by wind, snow, rain - gathers at
the foot; returning.
...
Patches of green on
the red & yellow fabric
fluttering in place.

These are from last Thursday's trip (11 August) to the Hopi Reservation to visit with Red Feather, an affordable housing organization doing strawbale buildings. It was part of my internship with the Sustainable Building Program and was interesting and exciting, and just somewhat frustrating. These are mostly comments on the landscape which was beautiful and austere.

Also:

[2 August, Rain]
Does a drop make rain,
or the percussive song, or
umbrella-less-ness?
...
[3 August, Heritage Square]
Stone hewn & raw, born
& borne here; what names are known
to the stone alone?
...
[6 August, inspired by an old voicemail from Anna]
Listening to past
voices, loving parallels
& coming future.
...
[7 August, yardwork]
Here I have made a
shelter, just wood & stone &
green, sun-born shadows.
...
Hands that have sculpted
an earthen cradle for our
small, warm reaching flames.
...
[7 August, reflecting on occult research]
A mother spider
looms in occult space, pregnant
with bastard children.
...
Quine jests of chasing
squirrels around trees, but that
tree is not the Tree.
...
One, two, three... numbers,
not time. What then, is time &
what revolves outside?

Waking Early

2011-08-16T09:03:00.000-07:00

I got woken up early today, when most consider the day is still night. It wasn't what I had hoped for, but in the end I can't say that I mind. It - as well as another sort of frustrating awakening - has me thinking about using time and making time. I recall my junior year at Gustavus when I made a point to do everything I wanted to through force of making myself do them. I ended up crashing two months into the semester, but it was definitely a lesson. A lesson of what, I'm still trying to figure out.

My bedroom is the best lit in the house and I have that as a semi-excuse for staying in bed to work, despite being reticent to do so. I like my bed and I have amicably shared it more than once over the past week. Strange, I suppose, that it provided me so little repose last night. I have things on my mind and I can't say I know what to do with them. A few days ago I spoke with Miss Krysta about meditation. My friend and professor Dean Curtin would refer to meditation and being something to do with wild monkeys. Your brain is full of wild monkeys bouncing every which way you can imagine. I brought this up to Krysta. Meditation has never been something I thought of as particularly calming during the process. The process itself is pretty stressful. Imagine seeing all the things that have come up in your head - errands, responsibilities, news, politics, friends & family, romance, frustrations, grocery lists, a cluttered table or kitchen or desk - and just watching them whiz by.

Yikes.

But that isn't exactly where you are in meditation. At least, not where I am. Or Krysta for that matter. All that stuff that's in your head, well, it is you but it also not you; you can see it outside of your vantage. Meditation is a steady practice of observing the inside as the outside and, inevitably, the outside as the inside. Of course you're thinking about the cluttered desk, it's where you left the grocery list that you need to fulfill in order to kick dinner for someone who wants to come over and the kitchen is still messy from last night so you'll have to clean it before you can even use it today. Yep, yikes. Meditation and living mindfully - which I think includes cleaning up the kitchen - is about setting the world around you in order or perceiving the order in the chaos so that your internal world is in order or calming. It isn't ever perfect and all, but at least you can see it out there where it can be worked on and it isn't just in your head where it can hide in dusty, dark corners.

I pulled out my bodhi beads the other day and have them slung through my headboard. I showed them to Miss Amanda Iris last night and reminisced about India. Our conversation - the first in person in three months - had me a little nervous, sort of like the nerves of meeting someone new that you want to impress, but not exactly. The beads should have been with me for some time now, but I haven't done that. A mala - just a word for prayer beads - is a center for composing oneself, for breathing mindfully despite the running around of the day. Often, they are looped around the wrist and gradually handled as one breathes "Om Mani Padme Hum" or simply takes the time to inhale and exhale with patience and even kindness.

I fall in and out of practice somewhat too regularly. I never intend to let it slip, but early hours can be difficult and putting off breakfast or dressing for work or going to work can be just a little too much. That said, I can take that patience and kindness I have expressed to my breathing, to myself, to my monkey-like thoughts and pass them on to the people I see, work with, relate to, care for, and come into conflict. If one wants to do something well, do something right, one ought to start with oneself and work outward. If you expect to find guidance or satisfaction in the world outside then it will be more unreliable and likely will come short in relating to your inner realm. Often I have read how the human body - in full, not just tissue, bone, synapses, blood, and so on - is a microcosm of the Universe. I'm not sure if that's true. What I do believe, though, is that our perception of the Universe is ultimately a reflection of our perception of ourselves. It is not that what we are is the same as what is out there, but that we make what we are the same as what is out there. If we see a chaotic and cluttered world, that is because we have also become so; if we see a world of compassion and kindness, of beauty and harmony, then we are seeing that inside of ourselves as much as around us.

Also, Mix July-August 2011

2011-08-06T17:42:00.000-07:00

I've been meaning to post this. Let me know if you want a copy.

Something Like Summertime
1. Pursuit of Happiness by Barbara (Kid Cudi Cover)
2. Know Better Learn Faster by Thao with The Get Down Stay Down
3. Suffragette City by David Bowie
4. Bad Girl by Eli "Paperboy" Reed
5. Feel So Good by Loudon Wainwright III
6. Sugar Baby by Bob Dylan
7. Time by Tom Waits
8. Bad Education by Tilly and The Wall
9. Who by Fire by Leonard Cohen
10. The Painter's Arm by Paper Tiger
11. City With No Children by Arcade Fire
12. Sun Lips by Black Moth Super Rainbow
13. It's Going Down (ft. Lateef the Truth Speaker & Keke Wyatt) by Blackalicious
14. An Eternity Turns by Echo & The Bunnymen
15. Zombie by The Cranberries
16. I Am Leaving by Blue Roses
17. By Boat by Andy McWilliams
18. Go On by Basia Bulat
19. The Wind and the Dove by Bill Callahan
20. The Sun Highlights The Lack in Each by Bonnie Prince Billy

Reflections on Affections

2011-08-06T16:53:00.001-07:00

I have been thinking of love of late. For those who have known me a while, this is not news. I become enamored quickly and love to dote on friends and especially sweethearts. I overthink things. After considering various terms of endearment, I decided that "sweethearts" is preferable to just about anything else. Not only is it gender neutral, it is heart-warming and endearingly jaded. Words that have fallen out of use earn my affection.

That isn't the same kind of affection I am thinking of though. After a knockabout month of travels at the beginning of the summer (all I posted in the month of May was a poem by e.e. cummings), I have attempted to abstain from romantic entanglements. There are reasons for this which I will not here go into. What I think has developed over that period is a perception of the affection of others. (I hope you're not getting tired of literary devices, I fear they will be coming around again in this post.) The previous year has set me in a community where I am around friends and colleagues noticeably older, and sometimes younger, than myself. I am happy for that. Just like the year before that I was allowed to appreciate my mother more thoughtfully and more graciously than I ever managed in high school or college, I have been given the gift of expanded perception.

I have been reading Kenneth Grant, an occult historian and magician (or whatever the preferred nom for the magically inclined) who refers heavily to Aleister Crowley. Crowley and Grant both have a great deal to say on how reason, the sentiments, and the self interrelate. Perhaps it is surprising that these considerations are rather challenging to me. Though I have not read Ayn Rand, I think the effect is similar: All of a sudden, one realizes that one doesn't exactly believe the agenda set forth, but it seeps into one's mind all the same. What I mean to say is that my conceptualization of love comes to mind regularly in both reading (whether it is Grant and the Vincenzi story or on cohousing and community building) and day-to-day reflections.

What gets me is that these wonderful pairings of people have a real sense of one another. The women - as is my habit, I am better acquainted with the women of these pairs - have a profound sympathy with their partners. Sympathy meaning "same feeling" (sun/with - pathos/suffering or feeling) and it is clear that that reality of same feeling is lived for these couples. What further excites my attention is that the relative longevity of their relationships doesn't make them any less youthful from time to time.

Let me relate an image. Love is often considered a flame, a fire burning between two people. It can be in the heart, mind, or spirit. Sometimes that flame is out of control, as in Romeo & Juliet (this is one of the reasons I have never taken to the play) or a passed relationship described in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver. When one is young or inspired to youthfulness by love, the fire is hot, uncontrolled, and wild. Its tongues whip the air all around it and threaten the stability of nearby trees, passers-by, buildings, and such. Any attempts to control the fire can force it even higher. (This is actually the case when attempting to use water to squelch the most dangerous of forest fires because the water breaks down into hydrogen and oxygen, which only feed the fire.) This can also be the case when one or both of the partners involved is poorly controlled; that is the person at the party who keeps feeding the fire when it is already good and hot, especially when "feeding" involves the more combustible of fluids. Love, in this case, is deliciously chaotic and lively, but potentially terrifying and aggressive.

Though I think of myself as a passionate person, even from time to time as a romantic person - a sense of myself I've never been able to shake - this is not a love that I am especially enamored with, so to speak. Rather than the over-the-top blistering heat of a wildfire, I become more and more invested in the slow, smoldering burning love. I think it is odd that "smolder" is a term that sometimes describes young lovers who "burn" for one another. What I see more and more is smoldering love that has lasted through seasons, has been tended through rains, and has had its heated peaks and its cool offs; what remains are the embers that persevere and reignite the fire after distance and - heaven forbid otherwise - the partners know that the flame is burning bright after a twilight session. (This is more than a little inspired by the fireside soirée a week ago when the embers of the fire remained sheltered under a terra cotta pot and burned slowly for hours.)

Love, the long-lasting smoldering of affection I have been witness to of late, has that power for those around it. Whereas the wildfire affections of the young (of which I am, nor really most anyone is, not exempt from) consume their surroundings and require the addition of greater and greater quantities of fuel, this other affection warms those around it even if they are not party to it. It can be fierce and insistent (I noticed the terra cotta pot was untouchable in no time), it can tug you by the hand and pull you along, but it provides as much if not more than it takes. In a way, this is perhaps an expression of gratitude to those in love around me, those who have allowed me the pleasure of enjoying the warmth that they radiate. Then, there is also the way that seeing it, knowing it even if from the outside is keenly educational. I was told recently of the maturity I have as a young man and the perspicaciousness I have - on occasion, at least - concerning the feelings of those around me. This is an echo of comments I have heard before, but do appreciate it. I think, though, I am being humbled by the behaviors and emotions so pleasantly, wisely, and sincerely manifest around me.

Kiva & Haiku

2011-08-01T16:48:00.000-07:00

I just got this email from Kiva. Kiva connects folks with a little bit of money to folks who are asking for a little bit of money in the form of a loan. It seems that Kiva is looking for more lenders (which is awesome) and you can "get" $25 to lend care of, well, Kiva. I've written of Kiva and financial independence, political capabilities, and so on here if you want a little more info. Or, just check out their site. If you want to lend, follow this link for "free" lending money.

Welcome to the month of August! This is the month I am determined to get through a draft of Vincenzi! Give me some encouragement and check in to make sure I'm on top of it! At this rate, I think I need to write a chapter every three days or so, which means about three pages a day. No more late nights unless I get it carried away. Also, I am nearly done with the Business Plan (Appendix I) for my thesis. Though it may sound funny to be writing an appendix now, I want to use it to apply for grants. It also acts as a summary of the paper, or at least what I am building toward with my paper while taking advantage of the research I have done this summer. Unfortunately, I think I am going to have to tediously sort through research notes in order to fill a literature review and bibliography appropriately. If you were unaware, I am somewhat loathesome of literature reviews.

As a close, a few haiku (from 28 July):

[House]
Cut down the timbers,
notch & assemble, but what
is lost & what gained?

...

[Sprouts]
Soak overnight, sit
in puddles of light, observe
the slivers of green.

...

[Yogurt]
Spirits in pure, white
cream perform their alchemy
with flame & my spoon.

Review of We by Yevgevny Zamyatin

2011-07-28T21:48:00.000-07:00

Just wrote up a glowing review of a dystopian classic on GoodReads. Check it out. Also, did one for It's A Bird, a very fine, startling, and beautiful take on Superman. I have a small stack of graphic novels, short stories from Zamyatin, more Kenneth Grant, and (what I'm really excited about) Gun With Occasional Music by Jonathan Lethem to get to. It has been a deliciously gray day out here in Flagstaff with rain and epic arcs of lightning, with peals of lightning in quick pursuit. I have projects ahead of me (bike repair and firepit construction) before a little get-together Saturday night. In other news, I start volunteering at the CSA this weekend, which is rather exciting. Wish me luck as I check in with a few possible employers tomorrow, as well. I am on to chapter 19 of the Vincenzi story - recognize that the first ten chapters require some serious revision since they were written last year - and think I have about eight to go plus a brief conclusion/epilogue. Even in a draft format, I want to compile the chapters and have request editors. I would definitely appreciate it! And tomorrow afternoon I am going to finalize revisions I have been postponing and submit them to The Sun next week. I won't hear back for a few weeks or months, but it will be a nice break from thesis-ing.

"Between the Folds" as well as Unfolding & Remembering

2011-07-25T10:40:00.000-07:00

See the preview and more info here.

First of all, a hearty recommendation. It is elegant, smart, and precise without missing the playfulness and humor of its subjects. It has to do with paper-folding, mostly origami but not exclusively so, and the way it has become incorporated into artwork, physics, mathematics, medicine, astronomy, and more.

What strikes me most clearly is that with all the attention to physicists and mathematicians experimenting with origami, they don't touch often on descriptions of the universe that depend on membranes. Theoretical physicists, who sometimes seem to change their theories once a month, have at one time or another described the universe as a series of membranes in contact and concert with one another. Or, if I recall correctly, that the universe is part of a whole symphony of interacting membranes that seem to have manifestations in one another's realities. Why, for example, is gravity such a weak force in our universe? Sure, as a human being, an organism, and coherent matter, I am rather pleased to be constituted of more than just blobs of plasma or disparate clouds of gases. When compared to the intensity of electromagnetic waves that can fry a brain or stop a heart nearly instantaneously, or the way massless photons can give me cancer or power a city, gravity comes up a little short. Sure, it might get me if I'm thirty or more feet up and falling, but even that only happens at a rate of 9.8 m/s/s. (Sounds like gobbledygook, but it is the case. Look it up.)

Anyway, what Between the Folds feels like to me is a rich articulation of how our universe might just function. Without a doubt it does this through ingenious artistic and mathematical examples, the "postmodernist's" simplicity, and "les anarchistes" delight in chaos and degradation, but doesn't that sound, well, perfect? Our universe is so richly composed of strange, serpentine dragons that coil around themselves and form proteins in our cells; the peculiar human molding and folding of minerals for our own devices; the aeon's long uplift of tectonic plates as they pass over, under, and across one another; and the terrors of stellar decay and reconstitutions in living tissue. As is put in the documentary, these are transformative processes; origami is the transformation of a simple plane into something else without losing that initial coherency of the plane itself. Most visual arts are subtractive (sculpting) or additive (pottery, painting), but our world as a whole is neither additive nor subtractive (excuse the black hole for a moment); transformation is what our universe seems to be best at.

In Virtual Light by William Gibson (I try to avoid spoilers here), one of the protagonists - a bicycle messenger named Chevette - saves her income to eventually purchase a Japanese bike made from laminated paper. Simultaneously, the plot arises from an attempt to refashion a post-quake (referred to as the Little Grande) San Francisco with an impressive, privatizing facelift. This is revealed in the artifact from which the title is drawn. For anyone who is familiar with augmented reality (AR) programs, well, it has to do with that. What AR does is it allows someone to place digital objects in the analog/material world. With a program such as Layar, one might peer through one's phone at a restaurant down the street and see a series of reviews from Yelp or Google; toggle the phone a little and you can see the menu, specialties, seat availability, and more. If you turn your camera down the street, someone may have just coded in a Chinese dragon to undulate down the street for Chinese New Year or a digitized clown filling balloons and releasing them into the air for a child's birthday. AR creates a reality or series of realities for us to peek into through a digital mediator.

(Note: I have misgivings about AR, but they are not immense. In addition, I think it functions similarly to magical perception in which one perceives the analog/material world and acknowledges and can eventually become sensitive to the layers unseen. Then again, that sounds an awful lot like how a cellular phone or radio transmission works, or even meteorological and geological processes. Heck, even political boundaries function as unseen layers until one is made aware of them.)

The connection here, and it may be thin, is that we have already blanketed our world in an additional layer of information beyond the traditional realities. We have an informational, a digital layer that surrounds us, saturates us, infiltrates us. And this layer is composed of only 1s, 0s, and spaces! Wait, couldn't that also be interpreted as + marks, - signs, and spaces? That sounds just like a plane that is folding up, folding down, or laying smooth. How strange is that? And then another line from the documentary comes to mind, that a fold in a paper cannot be undone; the paper "remembers" the fold, the fold is teaching the paper to exist in particular way. Now we do see a difference, a sort of inherited richness that evades AR: Paper, and I think substance, does not forget what it has been taught; what one does afterward is dependent and controlled by the past.

Though on a more fundamental level, that may sound strained, even paranormal. What comes to mind first, though, is an ecological example. Aldo Leopold journals the exploits of he and his family to restore a Wisconsin farm to like-wild conditions. They plant trees and clear invasives, they deconstruct old buildings and open up corridors for wildlife, and they make space for more-than-human world to reintegrate itself into the place. The space was taught to be a farm, one that wore down the soil and killed or warned off wildlife. The Leopolds and Aldo's students worked to teach the land to be something else, something it once was; those creases and plains remained, but had been transformed and submerged. The project was to reawaken memory, to recall what had been forgotten.

In Waking Life - recently revisited with Miss Becca Taylor - Timothy "Speed" Levitch declares, "Before you drift off, don’t forget, which is to say remember. Because remembering is so much more a psychotic activity than forgetting." And I include this for two reasons: First, I love this line; and second, if paper remembers, if the membranes of our world remember, then that says something of them. Remembering, as it is usually considered, is a process of an intelligent - not necessarily aware - entity. A child remembers to come home before dark, a dog remembers a hand that feeds and pets it, even some single-celled organisms "prefer" those places where they previously found optimum conditions (food, light, shelter). But a crystal can be "taught" to form in different ways (see super saturation) - which is a plot point in Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle. What I intend to say is that, if Speed Levitch is right, that remembering is a psychotic activity, and that remembering is also a process of paper or minerals, let alone the stuff the sculpts our world, then these psychic processes are going on all around us all the time.

My friends and I have more than once felt dispirited by the difficulties of getting things "right." As Martin Sheen has said on drilling in ANWR, but descriptive of environmentalists' fight the world over,

To this point we've won every fight. But environmentalists must win every fight, for the opposition only has to win once and we could forever lose this incomparable ecosystem that is home to hundreds of bird species, polar bears, muskoxen, grizzles, wolves, caribou, and more.

I hesitantly, rather than enthusiastically agree with this statement. We are at a point in our planet's history where a loss is a loss forevermore. Except where that's not the case, where the land can still remember what it was and where we human beings can uncover, to remember what has been asphalted over with the land. Leopold demonstrates this, but also learns to identify with the wolves and that without the wolves, the mountains have no one to protect them. The mountains remember the wolves, they require their protectors from the mule-deer who would, unknowingly, strip the mountains bare. He writes, "Only the mountain has lived long enough to listen objectively to the howl of a wolf," and I think where we can, we need to learn to listen for the recollections and wisdom of the great folding immensity of our mountains (and rivers, oceans, plains, winds...).

Out West: My Mom's Visit and The Peculiarities of Flagstaff

2011-07-24T13:36:00.000-07:00

My mom came to visit for a few days. I was happy to run around with her, showing Flagstaff to her, taking a trip to Rabbit Run Farm and Jerome, and eating plenty of fine food. She enjoyed herself and appreciated the effort made on her behalf. Her visit threw me out of a rhythm, but it was well worth it, and now I am trying to get back into a regiment of research, writing, and work (interning and plant-sitting). As one might expect, we conversed on many things and one such subject comes to mind just now.

She was unable to place it, but my mom had a strange feeling here in Flagstaff. Perhaps it was the dry weather or the altitude, or the way housing and renting work out here (something I think outsiders can perceive rather quickly), or the amalgamation of people that Flagstaff attracts. After a fine evening out, she commented on the intelligence and experience that my friends here have. Not only do people here seem to come from all over, they come with histories and stories and knowledge from all over the place. Flagstaff seems to be a locus for synthesis, for splicing together the peculiarities of our experiences into something more coherent. Well, maybe not more coherent, but stitched together.

Three weeks ago, when driving out to Rabbit Run Farm in Skull Valley, Becca asked me what it was like coming out here (Flagstaff? Northern Arizona? Colorado Plateau? The West? Arizona?) from Nebraska. It seemed both astute and odd; ultimately I couldn't say what it felt like, responding sardonically that the answer would have to be extraordinarily metaphorical to get it right. I let Sarah in on Becca's query at the farm, and she more or less agreed. Out here is different, but how it is, all the ways that it is different sort of hide from language. That said, I think my mom was as aware of it as anyone.

Coming from the Midwest, a assume a sort climatological norm. Hot and humid summers, cold and brutally dry winters; cloud bursts after days of overcast skies, sun and wind that seem to be trying to scramble you like an egg on the pan; and the clear but definite transition of seasons from one to the next. Up here, I was shocked by the comfort of pre-monsoon dry heat and cool nights on my first visit. It seemed deliciously comfortable. The sun - over a mile closer here than in Nebraska - has an impressive intensity, usually clear and welcoming except in direct sunlight at midday. I burned the first few days I was here, unaware that my skin could burn so quickly in such an otherwise mild clime. And at this altitude there seems to be an absurdity of seasons: frosts in June, temperate cool days in February and March, an arid and empty yard that explodes into green between May and June, and nights in mid-July that require a sweater or jacket after a mean, sunny afternoon in the 90s.

We seem to be blessed by manic conditions, by a rapid change from one thing to the next. I have always admired - as long as I can recall, at least - the honesty of weather in Lincoln. If it was cold, it was cold; when it was hot, it was hot; and when you needed to be outside, something about the day could call you out into it. (My mom might argue that I had to learn to listen to such a calling after a lethargic childhood and early adolescence inside, to which I cannot seriously argue. Lincoln, to my ears now, has its odd beckoning calls regardless.) Flagstaff has many blessings and beckoning calls, but you would be wise to pack a raincoat if you're going out in the afternoon, a sweater if you'll be out later. Oh, and if you're headed out in the morning, be sure you have somewhere to stow your early morning garb for when that mercury begins to rise.

Honestly, I think that such upsets make and attract the peculiarities of its residents. How can you expect an homogeneous crowd when the season shifts so radically over the course of the day? People reflect their surroundings and this place has plenty of idiosyncrasies to emulate and admire. It is a little funny that I have landed on housing and planning for my thesis, I can quite rapidly consider a dozen other subjects around which I might right a hundred or two hundred pages. That richness and variety reflects the richness and variety of where I find myself, the people and passions all around me, the needs and potentials hidden beneath the thinnest of skins out here.

Not to say thin skins are common here. I am under the impression that one develops a fortitude from this thin air and this sharp sunlight. I have met and worked with those people who seem capable of letting an emotional or conversational sleight bleed for days, weeks, months. That is not the case here. I have an abundance of strong, determined, and wizened (sometimes harshly so) people to inspire me, not to mention a fickle place to repeatedly suggest a change of perspective.

Check out my new post

2011-07-22T15:38:00.000-07:00

I have a few entries (the last two most recent) up at the Northern Arizona Sustainable Communities Report blog. Check it out. I has some thrown about philosophy to boot.

You can probably expect a real post up here tomorrow. As it is, I would rather be in the kitchen right now.

My mom just visited. She is awesome and I was happy to host her. I am appreciative to all those lovely people who kept her company and engaged her in fine conversation. I know she enjoyed herself. Tomorrow's post may say a bit more.

There are lovely people all over this damn country. I wish they were a good deal closer. I am thinking fondly of those far away and want you all to know that I hold you close, despite our distance.

Storms and Absenteeism; Set Aside Haiku

2011-07-10T12:54:00.000-07:00

I've been a little absent lately. You may have noticed. I have been writing only gradually on Vincenzi after posting the chapters a few weeks ago. Research on the thesis, as well as reading for Vincenzi, have had a sort of dull, but steady pace. The sun and rains are out - sometimes simultaneously - and that has shifted my mood a bit. As my mother can attest, my mood has been rather and frustratingly subdued due to an overabundance of free time and and frustrating vacancy of income. Both of these I am capable of remedying, but I have a strong preference for work I can stick with over time rather than work that I plan to do for only a scant few, if profitable, months. As it is, I am sitting on potential part-time eggs that would carry through the school year and beyond; to say the least they have not yet hatched. Alas...

Last night, though, there was a storm. The monsoons - summertime, midday rains - have arrived in Flagstaff and I love them. The Southwest has been plagued by drought and fire and despite the divine efforts of some, many parts remain unseasonably arid. (Who would have thought that global climate change would actually get to Texas so soon? Too bad politics don't change as quickly as the weather out here.) At least two of my housemates were frustrated by my eager and sometimes overeager meteorological prognostications, hoping for endless days of sunshine and heat. (I am not arguing with any Midwesterners out there about what constitutes hot, but am mostly reflecting the local sentiment.) I, on the other hand am thrilled. Walking around last night down a nearly deserted San Francisco Street, my umbrella an unimpressive shelter from the rain, was an unadulterated pleasure. It was heavy and chill and wet, but like rain in the Midwest - even where it can be fierce and deadly - it feels like a blessing.

In high school I had a penchant for writing poems about clouds and the rain. A leaden and laden cloud has a distinct look of... well, pregnancy about it. It is full; full of not-yet rain, not-yet lightning and thunder, not-yet sound and fury, and the not-yet life that follows. Rains are signs of fertility and blessing, they bring a sense of novelty to place and a power to disrupt what is going on for what is to come. Desert rains clean off the dust and pollen that has gathered on fenceposts, building walls, car doors, and the rest and it is suddenly gone, everything crisp and new. I recall Daniel Pinchbeck writing in Breaking Open the Head that many intoxicants, marijuana being the most abundant example, can reveal the novelty we once experienced in the world as children; this, he argues, is why everything is so "deep" when one is high and that one can be enchanted by the most mundane of realities. Honestly, I think rain does this to me. (Rain and the movie Pleasantville, after which I always sort of breath deeply and thank the stars I live in a world as vibrant and rich as this one.)

An optimistic assessment of my absenteeism may suggest my own fullness. I am determined to finish the rough draft of the Vincenzi novel this summer - preferably by the end of August or earlier - and am expecting to have something like a literature review accomplished for my thesis before classes begin. I am keeping busy, if somewhat distractedly so, and my silence is a sort of outward contemplation of the internal brewing. I have also made a bit more of a point to meditate and practice focus explicitly, which I have a heartfelt hope leads to greater success on the previously mentioned projects. An uncommon clarity of dreams and recording them also suggest an awakening, heretofore latent power in me; or so I expect. This fullness - characterized by a frustrating lethargy in between bursts of energy and a sense of overall frustration and anxiety - may very well be a creative pregnancy. I like the idea, it is something to meditate on and make real. I hope that with some diligence it will sprout out of the rain-soaked earth, all green and fresh and ready to grow.

...

Post-script: In typing "mundane" I seem to prefer to type "mundance" which sounds like a delightful everyday sort of dance, but also seems to suggest the moon. Of course, Moondance is a Van Morrison song, besides. Not to mention the theme of rain, which suggests "dancing in the rain" (my favorite reference being this one). Mundance is simultaneously mundane (ie everyday, nothing special), a regular and fun dance, and a celebration of the moon (the ending of the day?). Not exactly a "deep thought," but a game my fingers played and wanted to entertain.

...

And some set aside
haiku I allowed to lounge
in my Moleskine

(Note: Moleskine, being Italian, has a pronounced final "e".)

20 June

Le chat noire across
the street, all eyes & black fur
& welcome mystique.

These everyday
monsters - one's intrusion, the
other's chase - spook me.

27 June, from the Macy's patio

Stones scattered in
spirit, gathered in love;
not human, aware.

Not the first to see
the serene excitement of
the bark-line faces.

Midday broken in
copses & stealthy shadows;
revealing? Hiding?

Gewgaw windows of
inverted stars forced
from occultation.

Vincenzi, Chapters 11, 12, 13, & 14

2011-06-23T22:42:00.000-07:00

Preface

I have returned to Vincenzi after a lengthy hiatus. Miss Lauren's encouragement, as well as more general writing commentary from friends has me working at my writing more. The expectation to write in a more specific, placed way at the Northern Arizona Sustainable Communities Blog, which you should check out, has me simultaneously curious about my fiction. Also, I have finally made a point to read Kenneth Grant's work. For those who are unaware, Kenneth Grant was an occult historian (he died earlier this year) and magician (as far as I can tell) whose ideas peculiarly link the weird fiction of H.P. Lovecraft and the magick ways of Aleister Crowley. As an aside, I think Lovecraft himself would cringe at Grant's suggestions, but I am interested in understanding them in order to incorporate them into the fiction I am writing. I like to think that this continues Lovecraft's own tradition of weaving in actual works on the occult with his own fictional library. Anyway, I have just concluded the "dinner scene" in the Vincenzi story (a draft of it, anyway) that is intended to provide a firm and recuperative familial context for our protagonist that allows him to continue his work. I have enjoyed writing this a good deal and feel that, in some ways, it will eventually stand on its own as a story within the novel itself.

I hope you enjoy it.

Oh, and I am aware that there are likely shifts in tense. As the earlier chapters point out, this is intended to be a sort of journal kept by Lorenzo and ought to be in past tense. Such details will be worked out in revisions. Also, tabs do not translate easily and so you'll have to make sense of the indentations on your own.

...

Chapter 11

The bell of the phone split my head with each ring. I knocked it off its cradle reaching from beneath the covers.
“Hey Lo', you up yet?”
“Almost.”
“You going to make it to dinner like the rest of us?” The voice was familiar, feminine; it did not draw me awake, but I could feel in it the grooves of routine.
“Course. What time?”
“The usual, two o'clock. Ma's going to ask about church.”
“She always does.” A sister, that's who it was.
“Well, you go?”
“Not yet.”
“You mean not yet today, right? Or do you mean not yet, this year?”
“Cam, you know how I feel about it.” Camille, the baby of the family except for our cousin Alecia, calling to make sure I would make it to Sunday dinner. I thought back to rescheduling our trip to the Mansion with Junior. It must have occurred to me, family dinner is always Sunday, a tradition older than me and I was the oldest of our generation of Vincenzis.
“Well, she'll ask. Maybe you went last night.” She paused, stewing over some scheme to keep me in maternal good graces. “Are you hungover?” She must have given up.
“Hard night. Not exactly.” The words tumbled all out of order.
“Clean up before. Don't make Ma sour about your fall from grace.”
“I'll try to.” And chewing my lip I remembered last week's supper. “How's Gia?”
“Oh, Gram's alright. Mickey's hip flared up again and she's scheduled for surgery now.”
“She's healthy enough for it?”
“Enough. I guess. Long recovery at her age, though. And it has Gram all worried.”
“That's how she is. Anything else?”
“The Castevets are coming in this time. You missed their last visit.”
“What was that, three months ago?”
“Six. Aunt Lynn spits fire about Laurie being so distant most of the time, especially after having Alecia, but she's happy they're all coming in.”
“Even Michael?”
“Yeah, even Michael.” The whistle of Cam's breath catches in the silence of the line. “Let's cross our fingers.”
“No kidding,” I added listlessly. Christmas, two years ago, Michael picked an argument with Papa Al – my granddad and the uncle of Laurie, Michael's wife – about ceremony and ritual in the Church. Michael's the type that can't let himself out of an argument once he's in it and Papa Al, well, he just thought he was in the right. At least while Michael was in a Vincenzi household, I'd agree Papa.
It didn't help that Michael had one of those smug, patronizingly worldly faces that you just wanted to land a fist on. He had a faded scar below his left ear, just under his chin, where a bar patron in Singapore felt the same; and a slight kink in his nose from when a Brazilian businessman felt shorted. It seemed that, when plied, Michael had a hundred stories of coming up on the wrong end of a fist or worse in his travels and dealings.
“Shape up Lo',” Cam said, quietly and sincerely breaking the pause. “I'll see you in a few hours.”
She hung up and I let the quiet of the line hum for a minute before I set the receiver on its cradle. I glanced toward the patient click of the clock: 11:15. Later than I had hoped, but not bad for the momentum I had been riding and whatever it was that hit me after The Hook. Delle's visage hung over my lazy eyes, like the impression of the sun on eyelids, and I smiled at the sardonic care she took to get me home. Arrow was at the museum and I grumbled at the absence.
I wanted to make sense of the episode and tried running through it all again. Everything following the music store was grainy, but it fell together. The stop at the music store, Uncommon Sounds, and encountering Jakki's topsy-turvy manner; I felt in the pants pocket I still wore and pulled out the rumpled notepad leaf with her number and set it next to the phone, sliding the note under one of its feet. I chuckled remembering her and the way that already it seemed a week, a month distant.
Then the episode of the cell, the voices opposite the door, the monstrous weight of control and impotence. I shivered thinking about it, but dredged up the memory as my pen scrawled over the page that seemed, magically, to have showed up in my hand.
The Hook and the aggression, the violence brimming over the edge of me. I reflected on the gang of youths in the street, identifying an outsider, the way I must have radiated the not-belonging as I faked confidence and assurance. Inside, though, something had fractured, a chipped window let in the fog and obscured everything. Intoxicated, by the experience and the behavior, and the loss of control left me with an unwholesome richness that I couldn't shake.
Scooting along on Arrow, I couldn't quite make sense of how I had connected the dots, how I could have made sense of my state and ended up at the museum asking for Delle. Then, the dreaming, the abyssal ocean and its dark mystique, the confusion of voice and touch and surreal impression; it clung like brine to my skin, salt and sweat and the cold rot of seaweed swept up on the beach.
I water on the burner, low, and peeled what was left of my disheveled clothes off: one shoe, scrunched socks, belt-less pants, shirt with a tear near the top from some twisting maneuver in the night, undershirt. Steam from the shower began gathering as I examined myself in the mirror. I prepared to shave and shut the door to keep the heat in. My razor was that perfect level of dull, catching the whiskers and drawing at them slightly, leaving that roughened and faintly scratched surface behind; it felt like shedding a skin, shuffling it off like a snake.
After, I ran my hand through my hair, grimy and as knotted as possible. My stomach grumbled, empty and unhappy, but with that certain sensation of happy expectation, the spice of hunger lingering at the edge of my tongue. The steam from the shower wrinkled the edges of the wallpaper and I smiled with the sense of saturation, of loosening the grunge and anxiety of the day. I used a horsehair brush, once stiff but softened with use, to dislodge it. I rinsed it and applied it to my scalp, too, feeling childlike as its harsh texture bristled like a mother's firm scrubbing and the bubbling of simple soaps.
The tea kettle was stuttering when I shut off the water. I dried myself and threw the towel around me before stepping into the kitchen, shaking loose tea into the pot, and pouring out the rumbling kettle. A caffeine kick wouldn't due, I decided, on a day full of family; and I savored the pungence of jasmine rising warmly to meet me. I covered the pot and returned to the bathroom to finish up. I chuckled at my hair sticking out in all directions and left brushing it till the very end.
I always managed to set aside a clean and confident outfit for Sundays. Slacks, an unstained undershirt, a sharply fitting shirt, a jacket that matched the pants, black or brown socks; of all things Ma and Granny Gabby – both married into the family – argued about, they agreed that their children ought to dress well. “Looking like you're ready for the day,” they liked to put it, and if someone showed up on Sunday or at some other gathering underdressed, it was all the two talked about the rest of the day. Better, though, than the two arguing with one another all afternoon.
After so long out of the apartment, the air had become stiff and still, strangely odorless. With the tea brewing it seemed to fill up again and I savored it. Late morning light crashed in through the main room window, reflecting off the glass coffee table and illuminated the space warmly. I glanced at the door of the sanctum and intentionally moved my thoughts away again as if shuffling a joker into a full deck.
I sliced bread, already slightly stale in the dry winter air, and set it in the toaster. The tug of hunger in my stomach had its particular appeal, a familiar emptiness, something I could hold on to; but if whatever had come over me last night was intensified by my day of coffee and nerves, then something to tide me over seemed wise. Smooth warmth came over my hands as they held the porcelain mug, chipped on the inside lip just to the right of the handle. The plain clay underneath – simple, unadorned, uniform – made me chuckle. I mused, “Only something made by a person could be so simple inside.”
And gooseflesh came over my arms and up my shoulders. I was on the case, even with other responsibilities, and the befuddlement of all these mismatched pieces suggested complexity, potency, and means of manipulation that had begun to creep in on me. Other cases had kept me up nights, had me running on fumes, and none of them had caused me to collapse the way I had last night. Not to mention the episode on the bus when I glimpsed the cell from Adler's shoes. The potential for connection between the Vision and the wave of fatigue, but whatever notion seemed to arise dissipated as I attempted to handle it.
The tea washed me out from the inside just as the shower and steam had cleansed me outside. The toast, spread with a thin layer of marmalade, scratched sweetly down my throat. Grumbles of mellow satisfaction rose, but were not satisfied, from my stomach. In a moment of calm, I savored each suggestion of myself, my body in this familiar space, and wondered what about it reverberated in me.
I had not dreamed. Who I was, where I was stayed exactly the same. Realization brought another laugh, quietly transformed into a sharp-cornered smile.
It was after noon when I finished breakfast and my second cup of tea. Howard's bowl was empty and I filled it again. Howard knew when he was hungry and for what he hankered. A bowl often lasted a week, but with the come of winter, his occasional bird became nonexistent prey and for the most part he seemed to avoid rats. Once or twice, I had seen him with a frog in his maw, but I could not figure where he might have found it.
The case had its gravity, pulling my consciousness toward it over time, but with Vincenzi family dinner fast approaching, I decided my destination, though, and struck out. Even if Arrow weren't in the museum garage, the ride was too long for him anyway. The journey took a bus ride and a few subway changes on the “T,” all in all taking at least an hour and a half. With something in my stomach and the clarity of solid sleep, the crystalline Sunday afternoon felt crisp, refreshing, and certain. I could use certainty right about now.
The first section of the trip, my thoughts lazed about in the blue sky, the ripples of clouds waving westward, and the meandering recollections of family. When I was younger, Gramma Gia – great grandmother to be exact – told stories of Enzo Vincenzi, her husband and my namesake. She described him as a young man in small town Italy in the 1920s. Enzo was good friends with Gia's eldest brother, Joey, who was thin the way strong, quick young men are thin. Joey had gone to fight even though he was too young. No one, Gramma said, was too young in those days to do the fighting. Enzo envied Joey's courage but, when he didn't come home, Enzo began to take up some of Joey's work.
Enzo, Joey's junior by two years, claimed the errand-boy job Joey had had. He helped Gia's ailing mother with groceries and housework. Ma, Gramma Gia would say, never got over Joey's absence and became stuck. In time or space or memory, it was hard to tell. Sometimes she would look at Lorenzo, young and lithe and powerful like Joey, and you could see her thoughts get away from her, her eyes soften and the wrinkles deepen at the edges of her eyes. Gia – not even a young woman at the time really, but just a girl – saw Enzo not as he was with his awkward length and bumbling around the kitchen, his elbows inevitably banging into something or painfully brushing against a pot on the stove, but as the man he was becoming. She would say of Pa Enzo that he was a man even then, perhaps unconvincingly, but that something had become alive when Joey died and she was captivated by it.
When the fighting spread out of the cities, the politics and the combat mingled together just about everywhere, Enzo began staying up late speaking with Gia's mother. Gia couldn't make sense of it all the time – her own work, especially with her Ma seemingly coming to pieces, was more difficult every day – but one morning, very early in the day, Enzo was in her room with her.
“Giovanna,” he said, his voice scraping tenderly at her full name, “wake up. We have a train to catch.”
“Enzo,” and she remembers the flush on her cheeks when she heard her own quavering voice, the way it spoke his name familiarly, softly. “What are you doing here?”
“Soldiers are coming. I don't want to fight with them. Will you come with me?”
Her eyes adjusted to the uncertain light of the stars. The moon had set and everything appeared in inky smears. As the scene – her small room and peasant bed, the glassless window with shutters open, the small desk her father and Joseph had built together – assembled itself from memory, she saw Lorenzo's face, not clear in the least but somehow defined. She would describe the way his cheeks had thinned, his nose sharpened, his brow firmed; he was then, even as young as he was, the man she had seen in him for sometime. She knew, too, that this was a man she trusted.
Sometimes Gramma Gia would say she nodded, other times that she whispered agreement; either way, they left that morning to catch a train out of town. Enzo, who been speaking to Gia's mother for weeks about leaving the country, first with both of them and then, as Gia's mother sickened, just the two of them. Enzo carried with him a small purse, sewn into the inseam of his pants, that carried two rings and the silverware. The silver didn't make it with them, but they found family friends when they arrived stateside and he showed them to her. The trek, of which Gramma never said much, was difficult and after it all she decided that she was a woman, at least woman enough to say yes.
I changed to the trains and for most of the rest of the trip, the sky was blotted out. My fellow travelers were few on Sunday, but many of them smacked of a certain familiarity. I thought of dreams and the people one meets in them. I considered the woman with the Irish accent, the other who had given Murlough the parcel, then of Jakki and her fierceness. Their faces varied from assembled to forcefully recalled, but I felt that they were revolving around the other face, the one with such power to captivate Malcolm and eventually incarcerate him. How she did it, I had little idea; that she did it, I was certain. The incidental Vision affirmed that much.
The question that remained, splintered in my mind, was, “What am I left with?” and, after that, “With whom?”
As I stared out at the unfocused sky, clouds sweeping in from the sea, I saw human forms suspend themselves above. I could not make sense of them, wanting to define them as one person or another. Murlough hung heavily in my mind. He obviously knew a great deal about these unpleasant matters, but not enough to settle him or allow him to plan his own actions. Stiletto remained blurred and uncertain; I had not even seen a photo of her since taking the case and that reality stung me. What did I have of this woman I was convinced was culpable? Visions, a manic conversation with an unreliable man, the confessions of a secretive collector, and the uneven accounts of a butcher and a purveyor of music: These were not the things of a case, the texture of which remained viscous and unreal.
Somewhere high overhead winds shifted and the clouds bunched. I saw not one of this cast, but my cousin, Alecia formed in the clouds. Her parents, Laurie being the grandniece of my grandfather, had kept her from most of these family gatherings. She and her brother Matt had become estranged because of the particulars of Laurie and Michael Castavet. Grasping the more elusive Castavets was a persistent challenge. They seemed religiously devoted to nothing at all, nothing clearly spiritual at least. Never has any of us any reference for such devotees of atheism. It took on almost a violent degree in some of the conversations with our kin.
Alecia, though, was in the midst of that adolescent meandering and aggressively unaware of her own direction in life. While her father would seduce any available audience with stories of his travels and discoveries – discoveries one always felt he was usurping from another – Alecia would uncover an unlocked door into an attic or cellar. The previous time she had come to dinner, six months to Camille's count, she had broken into the wine cellar and wriggled her way into an unknown, laddered chute in the southern corner. No one could find her for an hour and only when someone checked the cellar door, normally locked tight since I was a toddler walking around, did we see her come out of the tunnel.
Besides the grime she came up with, all was well. Though unperturbed, she said nothing of the adventure and no one else was adequately dexterous, let alone sufficiently lithe, to follow suit. Instead, the lock was changed and a heavy, manhole-like cover replaced the upturned boards to discourage further wanderings. Even though it echoed his own exploits, her father fumed, red-cheeked and aggressive. My sister Franny's husband Paul – big, Nordic type with a preternatural calm and warmth – had checked his every move for the hint that he would get violent. Paul, a high school counselor, is always one to navigate feuds and his attention to Michael was unnerving to everyone.
I had heard all of this, after the fact, from Cam. She kept me in the know whenever I missed a ritual Sunday dinner. As it happened, I had been on a mundane stakeout the night before keeping a keen eye nearly around the block. But I tailed the mug – a family man dealing a little of this (narcotics from out of town) and that (child pornography from an online dealer) to make up for bad investments – through the morning and was held up, groggy but satisfied, at the police station until that evening. From Cam and Franny's perspective, who had been catching up with Laurie, Alecia had been practicing lockpicking as a sort of after school activity and wanted to try the ancient locks around the house. Considering that the key to the cellar had remained in the china cabinet, they were likely right.
Only recently had Alecia come out of a long, bashful childhood. Through her elementary years, Laurie and their circle of friends had arranged a homeschooling agenda that had evolved into a grudgingly recognized charter school. Matthew had been among one of the first to go through the whole formative process (Kindergarten through a senior year) before going onto an Ivy League undergraduate. Matthew, with whom I had shared a peculiarly bifurcated competitiveness, had excelled in academia and approached us, like his father, with a certain patrician disdain. He spoke in archaic and verbose ways that frustrated my sisters and increased the animosity felt between what eventually felt like clan-based tensions. He was so clearly Michael's son that the family elders – Gram Gia, Papa Al, Great Aunt Mickey, and Great Aunt Lynn – ignored him as best he could to avoid arguments.
According to Cam – keen to the family politicking of Ma and Pa and their siblings – Alecia had, upon finding her voice, protested the school and its young sophisticates. She would break out of whoever's condominium they happened to be having class in that day, since the week was broken into six days in six different families' homes, often by escorting herself along a fire route after subduing the alarm. Laurie, Michael, and Matthew had tried to persuade her back, then into tutoring and homeschooling, but she wouldn't have any of it. And it was her willfulness that eventually saved her because for the past several months she had attended one of those rarely spoken-of academies. Its exclusivity was enough, for the moment anyway, for Alecia and was adequately accredited for the rest of the Castavets.
Getting out of the train car, I felt the familiarity of place, that warmth which infuses places with personal history and familial presence. I breathed deeply and felt the pleasant tugging on my stomach. Whatever happened, the gravity of home would hold. That, for this day, would be enough.

...

Chapter 12

Everyone's already talking at once.
“No, no, no. Like this. Stir like this.”
“Oh look who's come in.”
“Lorenzo, come give your mother a kiss.”
“And don't forget about your grandma.”
“Give the boy some air, why don't ya?”
“Oh he loves it, look at him!”
“When was the last time you ate, young man?”
And the wave of oregano and parsley and tomatos hits me with the tumult of words and embraces. The scene glows with a sort of autumnal light from the gas-stove tops and warm yellow curtains that suffuse the light throughout the space. I am distinctly passed around between Ma and Gram, and the other women in attendance. Pa just leans against the door frame to the kitchen with a whiskey, the ice tinkling against the glass, in his hands, chuckling at me. He is clearly, if calmly excited to see another man in the house.
Words tumble out of my mouth to each sparkling smile. “Missed you” and “Love you, too” and “How long has it been” all fall into the jigsaw puzzle places. Aunt Tina is gripping my arm and feeling the tense muscle underneath as she leads me into the frontroom where my sisters sit, laughing warmly. Tina's has just recently had her hair dyed dark again, hiding even the roots of her graying hair, but it stands out against the worn, long navy dress that still smells faintly of incense and church-goers perspiration. It is rare, I realize, to see her looking fragile. The winter, I think, keeps her from the gardening that she loves. Frankie and Cam cradle glasses of red wine that look to have been hardly touched. Frankie stands up first and gives me a hug. Her wool sweater with its Scandinavian style itches my freshly-shaved chin.
“How's Paul? Is he going to make it today?” I ask, thinking about the pleasant, calm company Paul provides. I scoot onto the sofa next to Frankie, Cam sitting at the edge of one of the overstuffed chairs while Tina shifted off the center of the frontroom.
“No, he'll be working at the school all day. Some kids were fighting on Friday and Paul decided to put together a sort of workshop. The violence, it has been almost infectious these days. Paul's bringing in family of all the boys involved to talk it out.”
“Well, we'll play a game or two of chess next time he makes it. Let him know.”
“Absolutely. You look like you've been working a little too.”
“Sure sounded like it this morning,” Cam chimes in as I take my seat. Tina hovers nearby, listening and stretching the tender muscles in her legs. I realize that her hold on me may have been for her own support as she recovers from knee and hip surgery.
“Just the past couple of days.”
“Anything you're going to tell us about?” asked Cam. She's obviously prepared for a day of food and family, happy to escape her usual academic confines. She had removed her charcoal jacket to reveal a simple, highly functional black dress with silver threads. In high school she had begun wearing men's sports coats that managed to augmented her small stature, giving her a deliberate panache of power while grating our parents' sensibilities. She and I spoke about her classmates sometimes, and when I raised questions about her style, she would laugh and deride the boys' clubs she had somehow infiltrated.
“I doubt there's much you want to know about it.”
“That's true, I suppose,” and Cam smiles knowing that sooner or later she'll hear the story parsed together in some manner.
“And how's school?”
“Oh, I doubt you want to hear about it,” to which I chuckle and Frankie laughs. “I almost have a model finished for the colloquium. A firm's going to hire the best in the class for this synagogue project.” Cam's five year architecture and design program has kept her busy since she graduated high school with honors. She's smarter than any of us and the gem of Pa's eye, especially because the program offers internships and student employment that means she's paying for the whole thing.
“Do you think you'll get it?” Frankie asks.
“It's possible. The professor won't say how many students are eligible, but we're guessing two or three. I've made summer plans already, so I guess I'm not betting on it.”
Tina settles in next to me on the couch, not sure what to make of herself given her current state.
“How are you feeling?” I ask, turning to Tina.
“It's not fun, getting better. I have that to say about it.”
“Has it been painful?” Cam inquires, and I shoot her a look of disapproval. She just ignores me though, waiting for Tina's response.
“Not so much now. I just can't move the same and that really bothers me. These boots,”– her feet are wrapped in black plastic ties and straps, a glint of steel here and there –“weigh to damn much, that's for sure,” she smiles as she says it and we laugh at her intentional indiscretion. Tina likes to think of herself as one of the peacemakers in the family and has always been attentive to my sisters and me, wary to negotiate the waters of adolescence. With Cam recently out of those trying seas, she has become more of a friend than before, though these little experiments with profanity hint at her continued uncertainty with the role.
“It's good to see you up and about,” commented Frankie.
“No kidding. That's why I can't complain. Whatever I'm feeling now is sure better than sitting or laying around all day. I was getting tired of those romance novels and old movies.”
“Has Richard been much help?” Frankie asks, expressing our own quiet concerns about their marriage. Richard, Tina's husband, works with airport security and is away often. Sometime over the previous three or four months, a rumor had spread amongst us that Richard had had some form of infidelity. The concern remained vague and immaterial, never to be identified as anything substantial.
“He's been around more than usual. Even took a holiday from work to take care of me the week after the surgery. Since then, he'll stay home with me or do errands. He even ran out for ice cream one night. It reminded me of when we were trying to get pregnant.” This conversational turn, unwanted and unexpected, left a sourness behind. Tina and Richard had, for many years in my childhood, tried unsuccessfully to have a child and that time remained a dark, familial memory avoided as much as possible.
“Well, I'm sure it is good to have him around. A change of pace,” Frankie's cheer trailed off, but its effect was felt.
“It reminds me of the first time I got sick at school,” Cam said, clearing her throat. “Away and lonely. All I wanted was Ma or you,” referring to Tina, “to come and take care of me.” Cam took the reins of the conversation and told her story, allowing me a little getaway. As I stood, I kissed Tina's cheek in an attempt at solidarity with whatever weights she carried.
The smells and heat radiating from the kitchen pulled me in. Ma and Gram lovingly argued over the steaming marinara. A pile of fresh, chopped herbs – basil, oregano, parsley – lay on the walnut cutting board, next to that a series of small bowls of olive oil are dressed with dried herbs – thyme, tarragon, rosemary and others. My great aunt Lynn sits at the kitchen table, which hardly seems to fit next to all pots, pans, plates, bowls, casserole dishes and cutting boards scattered about. She sips at a glass of white wine and smiles knowingly at the tidal culinary rivalry of her niece and mother-in-law. Lynn sees me and nods her head to the empty seat next to her. I pour myself a glass of Primitivo before joining her.
“And how are you young man?” Lynn asks after I kiss her cheek.
“Busy, I guess. Went from one job to the next.”
“No waiting tables in between?”
“No,” I say smiling. “Don't think I'm personable enough for waiting tables. They'd probably stick me in the back doing dishes.”
“Don't say that. Can you imagine your father's face? He'd be red for a week,” she says with a smile. Her eyes and mouth are edged by laugh lines. Lynn – married into the Vincenzi's via my great -uncle, Big Joey – had so easily appreciated the vivacity and characteristic energy of the family, that her quiet, even meditative manner had become a column of stability in difficult times. We liked to tease her that it was the Presbyterian upbringing that did it, that getting mixed up in a bunch of Catholics provided her just enough distance to be ecumenical.
“Well, I've gotten through worse times without washing dishes.” I noticed that her wine glass was empty before asking, “Where are Laurie and Michael? Cam said they'd be coming.”
“Running late, I suppose. Michael, he always wants to drive in rather than take the train. This time of year, I'm guessing they got hung up somewhere. You know how he is with directions.”
“I'm sure they'll be here any minute. And they're bringing Alecia, aren't they?”
“They promised to. She's such a sweetheart, I'm glad they got her out of that little institute they have. She needs more freedom than that.”
“Do you want another glass of wine? I can get it for you.”
“I'm not that old, Lorenzo. Treat this woman with some respect,” adding a smile to her chiding. She stands and goes and pours herself a half glass of the Riesling. She notes my glass and tops it off herself, providing a small flourish to suggest her preserved finesse. “Just as capable as ever, young man.”
As she sits, we both turn to the parlay going on between Ma and Gram Gia.
“You know if you bake the lasagna at four hundred it'll be cold by the time we serve it,” Ma argues. She wore a pristine green and white apron strapped over her housedress. Despite being somewhat radical in her youth – as she liked to say, “Who wasn't?” – after marrying my father Jules, she adopted her mother's way and collected distinct outfits for home, hosting, going out, running errands, and the rest. Cam, Frankie, and I could always tell where she had been by peeking in on the smoothed clothes laid out on her bed. She had chosen a well-loved blue dress with white polka dots, the fringe of the skirt just slightly frayed. As far as I could recall, she had always had the dress and it held in its threads the smell of innumerable dinners she had prepared while in it. Later, I imagined, she would change into her dress for hosting; but without the Castevets or any other less familiar family, she was in no rush.
“The center will be cold at three fifty, Maria.” Gram was waving a large wooden spoon – that with her Italian accent constructed a caricature of the Italian Grandmother – dripping sauce on the floor and some had already ended up on her messy, white apron. It seemed to have absorbed a little bit of everything – tomatoes, green herbs, a smear of grease from prosciutto next to drops of green-tinged oil, a white and blue speckle of Gorgonzola – and it lent to her an air of distinct authority. Miraculously, she had kept her yellow dress underneath untouched by the delicatessen of ammunition. “We'll just set it underneath the oven where it'll stay warm while the lamb finishes.”
“If the lamb isn't too tough by then,” a statement my mother would normally avoid.
“Now, I've made leg of lamb more times than you can count. Trust me. It'll come out just as tender as can be,” she added a wave of her spoon for emphasis. “Lynn, you know my lamb. Has it ever been tough?”
“I am sure everything will taste wonderful,” Lynn responded diplomatically.
“It is all wrapped up tight, so it won't dry out.”
“You're right, you're right. I give up.” Ma throws her hands in the air and turns to the big bowl of leafy greens. She begins to slice red and orange cherry tomatoes and toss them in. “Where'd these come from, Gia? They look gorgeous.”
“Oh, those are from Tina and Richard's greenhouse. Aren't they just beautiful? I'm sure she'll apologize for them for one reason or another. They have something going where they compost a restaurant's food waste and it makes enough heat for them to grow through the winter. Smart of them.”
“I can't believe you get tomatoes like these so early,” Ma playfully pops half of one in her mouth and clearly enjoys it.
“Is Giorgy coming in?” I ask. My uncle is an inconsistent attendee of the suppers because of work. He manages a handful of small gallery spaces for exhibitions, small plays, conferences, and the like. Carole, who had joined Giorgy for a dinner before, was clearly his boyfriend, but anything overt about the two of them was quickly, politely swept away. Lynn had been in quiet participation to a handful of conversations about Giorgy and Carole between my sisters, Giorgy, and I – this had preceded the two renting a place together that no one openly acknowledged – but other than the five of us, the topic never came up.
“In time for dinner, but he wanted to drop off a few things,” Gram replied. “One of the art dealers he works with just came in from Italy and Giorgy had her buy some cheese for today. Gorgonzola and Parmesan. Isn't that sweet of him?”
“And its just delicious,” Ma added, obviously nibbling on the waxy rind of the Parmesan. With even Cam out of the house, Ma had allowed herself the handful of childish pleasures she'd always enjoyed but never revealed around her children. One of which was eating a little of everything as she cooked. I asked her about it once and she said it was such a bad habit when you want to impress someone, but that way you knew just how good everything was before everyone else. She liked to be in the know, she had added with a grin.
“What else is on the menu?” I ask, hoping to keep the two from arguing as much as possible while also easing the pangs of hunger the rich smell elicited.
“Mickey made her stuffed mushrooms. Giorgy says he has a foccacia he'll bring over. Frankie made a tart that'll bake while we eat. And, this and that.” Gram would say just enough to whet the appetite without dampening the excitement for the meal. Mickey might have resorted to any of a dozen mushroom recipes and Giorgy had at least three variations on his herb, oils, and flours he liked to throw together. Frankie's could have five different fruit tart fillings, and “this and that” generally referred to unnamed deserts. I noticed too that the ingredients in the lasagna went unnamed, though from her apron, I was sure that prosciutto was a dominant ingredient.
I sipped at what was left of my wine, surprised to see it nearly empty, as Ma and Gram began to fuss around one another again. They were cooperative again, suggesting that whatever tension between the two that had precipitated the criticisms of the lasagna had quieted. Each was calmly aware of the movements of the other. Lynn and I watched the knowing, womanly dance of the two, quietly smiling and nudging each other when Gram patted Ma's substantial hip so that she could provide her own approval of the gravy for the leg of lamb or the béchamel sauce leftover from fixing the lasagna.
“Lo, go tell your father to turn that down a little,” Ma ordered in a singsong tone. From the study, something vibrant and orchestral blared. My grandfather Papa Al had for over a decade worn a hearing aid and with my father getting into his fifties, those same symptoms were arising in him. Normally, Ma would allow the volume, but with everyone coming in she clearly felt the need to keep a more serene house.
The smell of pipe tobacco and cigar smoke hit me before entering the study. Though the Vincenzi men had made a habit of opening the windows before smoking over the past few years – Cam, Frankie, and I had complained about the ills of tobacco through our youth only to have Cam pick it up in high school and I in college – but the innumerable pages continued to emit the odor regardless of whatever changes in habit had been made. Papa Al was smoking his pipe near the window, blowing long streams of smoke into the chill air. He was dressed warmly in a faded black wool jacket and fingerless gloves, which he had picked up with the initial onset of circulation problems. Papa Al, despite his age, still had the remnants of a much younger, active, and muscled man. He liked to walk everywhere and though he'd picked up a cane about five years previous, he acted like it was more of an accoutrement than a tool. And his broad shoulders seemed to conceal a firm physique despite the wear of age and tobacco on his face.
My father enthusiastically listened to the bellowing player. The record jacket revealed Mahler, Symphony No. 9 and it seemed well into the first side. Its rich, fluid swoops produced a mirrored wavering in Pa. He seemed to feel it as much as hear it and like a charmed snake, the movements of the music were reflected in his own gestures. It was a shame, I thought, to halt him so abruptly in the middle of his small luxury. He told me it was not until his thirties, when I was just a boy, that he had been coerced into a classical performance of Mahler by the Boston Symphony Orchestra that had turned him on to classical music. Up until then, he had relegated to old, uppity academics. And though he had explored other composers, preferring live performances whenever possible, Mahler remained his favorite.
“Pa,” I said, tapping him on the shoulder, “you have to turn it down.”
“Lorenzo,” he exclaimed and stood up in order to give me a hug. “When did you get here?”
“Ma says you have to turn it down.”
“Oh, of course.” As he quickly spun the volume dial to something reasonable. As he peered at the set, I went over and received a hug from Papa Al as well. My father's own tall, slender figure stood out all the more next to Papa Al. It was always a matter of him hugging you, of taking you into his big shoulders and smoky clothes and scraggly old man scruff.
“How are you, Lorenzo?” Al inquired knowingly. He had worked for years in manufacturing and then in carpentry and retirement had treated him well. Without the rigor of handiwork, many of the small ailments – mostly tendinitis in his shoulders and minor arthritis in his hands – had lessened. Though he moved deliberately and gradually, it was always with the same assurance and determination. He seemed a boulder, a hill of a man; always moving at his own pace. And in the way of quiet men, he seemed to always have answers to his questions.
“Hungry. I've been in the kitchen.”
“How long did you last?” Pa said, chuckling. With Cam moved out, he had begun to think of himself as an old man. Investments he had made early on had paid off and he had for the past year cut his working hours in half. A pair of attentive assistants had assumed his responsibilities at the publishing house and often he was able to call in instructions or organize his department over the computer. He took pride in so masterfully arranging his life that he would, if left unchecked, fill your ear with labor-saving schemes and investment strategies.
“Long enough. Gram and Ma were competing for whisks, but they calmed down. Lynn's in a good mood.”
“She's happy that Laurie and Michael are coming in. She feels like she hardly know Matt or Alecia,” Pa said. Papa Al savored his pipe, letting the smoke billow slowly from his mouth, catch the flow out the window, and disappear into the bright, chill afternoon.
“I believe it. Cam said its been six months.”
“Sounds about right. Let's hope Michael keeps his smartass mouth closed this time.” Like me, Pa was recalling the Christmas incident. Al seemed unphased by the reference, perhaps placing himself above it. Or at least that is what I hoped.
I reclined in one of the smooth, worn leather chairs neatly bound with scholarly brass buttons. Though my father and grandfather were sharp, even elegant men with their words, in the comfort provided by a known place and familiar company, they preferred their silences. Frankie had studied in the Philippines for a semester and came back to tell me of long, silent nights sipping tea with hosts; she had said it reminded her of Pa and Al staying up with their tobacco and coffee, whiskey or wine. It must have been after earning my accreditation that I felt welcome into their club, though few nights allowed me such repose. Right then I felt it that openness a space and time allows for you, when you can sense the tidal flow of the world wash past, not preoccupied, not concerned, but satisfied in where you have found yourself. Somewhere in that satisfaction, I could sense the rhythm and dim radiance of these patriarchs nearby.

...

Chapter 13

“Look who I found out in the cold!” My great-aunt Mickey announced as she enters, followed by Giorgy who might as well be invisible. Mickey, exuberant and playful even in her sixties, gestured straight through Giorgy to the Castavets as they come in the door. Mickey has on a beaming orange and yellow sweater that may compete with or compliment her tone, her gray and black hair pulled back in a braid that rolls down the front of her, and orange, thin-framed glasses suspended at the tip of her nose. Giorgy is sharply attired in charcoal jacket over a pale blue shirt – something expensive but not showy – and is already explaining to Gram and Ma that he had to take care of something at the gallery before picking up Mickey. (Cam and I glance at each other knowingly at this tired but functional explanation.)
Behind them the Castavets, pictured like any harried Manhattanite family coming in from the blustery winter day, a serpent of blown snow shivering around their feet and the door. Michael looked just as he might coming out of a long business meeting, his pressed white shirt ruffled by too much sitting and the lazy sweat of a heated car, his hair has an odd cowlick in the back from the chair, and one of his left pant legs seemed to be tucked partially into his blue sock. Laurie looked superb: dark brown hair flows in a wave around her shoulders to her simple red dress that frames a peculiar gold necklace fitted with an amethyst that Michael gave to her just after Matthew – their eldest – was born, black tights met her dress just below her knees, and the absurd but dashing black coat lined with silver thread and buttons sitting on her shoulders just as if it belonged there. She was smiling; not with the halfway grin of a guest, but of the serene pleasure of returning to those who have known her for years.
Alecia acted meek and almost bookish next to her parents, shuffling in from the cold and squeezing as quickly as possible away from the entry and press of people. She held both her oversized and brimming bag and her mother's slim, almost unused purse. She wore a long, tight-fitting skirt of dark green and a long-sleeved t-shirt with some peculiar logo on it, the silhouettes of skaters or rock and rollers surrounding it, and a slightly too large leather jacket. By the way her eyes danced down at herself and then at the marauding, half-remembered family, I could identify that alarm at strangeness. Cam, Frankie, and I had talked about the sheltered world of the Castavets, its obvious impacts on Matt and its inverse manifestation in Alecia, not the least of which was her profound inability to read the dynamics of our family. She edged toward her grandmother, Lynn, who calmly wrapped her arm around the narrow and hunched shoulder of her granddaughter and allowed a modest, but rich smile filling her face.
Michael and Laurie were the subject to the same familial mayhem that I underwent. I took satisfaction in seeing Michael's discomfort at kisses on the cheek and enveloping hugs. Laurie, on the other hand, was an adept. She swooped from one embrace to the next, greeting everyone them all with an earnest smile. When she came to me – holding guard near the back next to my father – she paused, held me at arm's length and said, “Lorenzo, you look just fantastic. I wish Matthew were here, am sure that the two of you would be fine company for one another. You know, you and he are almost exactly the same age.”
“It is good to see you, too Laurie. And you tell me every time I see you how Matt and I ought to be better acquainted.” We were hugging all of a sudden and for a moment I wondered just how Matt had turned out such a prig. This woman was so keen to social conventions, her familial – if oft neglected – ties, and the comfort that one person can provide another.
“Lo, how are you?” Michael was suddenly in front of me holding out his big mitt of a hand to me. I took it and pulled him in for a manly, pat-on-the-back hug, knowing all the time that it would peeve him to be drawn in so close.
“Michael, good to see you,” I said in his ear and held him just long enough to feel a squirm in his shoulders. He had, on previous visits, made it quite clear he thought himself above me. “How is that son of yours?”
“Busy as can be. He and Tris sure are a pair. You should see them out for the night. He works and works, then plays and plays. I don't remember having that much energy, but Laurie still recalls how I conned her into marrying me. I must have had something going for me.”
“No doubt,” and I finally let go his head, which had become hot and sweaty in my firm but not unfriendly grip. I liked to place my dislike of Michael in my passive judging of people picked up from the work. One has to learn to develop a picture of someone that, even if wrong, might allow for swift control of a situation. That is what I told myself as Michael chuckled uncomfortably and shifted himself, wrapping his arm around Laurie's waist.
I looked over to Alecia who was being similarly accosted but also shielded from the worst of it by Lynn. The entryway was cramped beyond capacity and though I tried to wriggle toward them, I made nearly no headway. Before anyone realized it, Ma was tapping the bottom of a plate with a soup ladle.
“If you are hungry, dinner is ready,” she announced in her maternal authoritarian tone. As Michael and Laurie passed, she gave each a firm hug and hurried them toward the dining table. When Lynn and Alecia passed, she patted her ladle on Alecia's head softly, leaned in, and whispered something in her ear. Lynn laughed quietly at whatever was said and smiled generously at Ma.
While I had been in the study the additional leaves of the table had been added, extending it through the double doors of the frontroom where the sofa, chairs, and table had been scooted close to the front window. Everyone expressed his or her own excitement – hands rubbed together, tongues licked lips, smiles of approval to the chefs, fingers pointing dangerously close to sampling one dish or another – as they found themselves seated snuggly together. The unusual presence of the Castavets meant a tighter table than usual, but from where I sat myself – in the frontroom, just one seat in front the end – Michael was the only one straining to find his own space. Everything bustled with electricity and comfort.
Papa Al stood at the head of the table in the frontroom and cleared his throat. I realized that he hadn't said anything at all in the study, just listened and puffed knowingly. Though about to break his silence, he first looked at each of the familiar faces, each beaming with a grin or outright smile on his or her face. I followed his gaze: first me, Cam, Ma, then Frankie, Uncle Giorgy, Aunt Tina and her husband Richard (somehow sneaked in while I was in the study), my grandmother Gram Gia at the far head of the table, Great-aunt Mickey and Great-aunt Lynn who was still protecting Alecia (who had not yet said a word, as far as I had heard), Laurie, then Michael, and back around to my father buffering Michael from Al. I breathed deeply, taking in all these faces I would call family and who would call me family in times of joy and times of need.
“Family,” Al began once the table fell silent. His voice was low and garrulous, smothered behind years of persistent moderate smoking and steady, unquiet use. “You are all family. Sometimes that can seem the most inconsequential of bonds. No one asks for the bonds of family, yet here we all are celebrating them. We have four generations represented at this table. Each in our own way has traveled far to be here today. I am gracious for each step you have made to join us today.
“Not all at this table share my beliefs. This I recognize,” Michael shifted as if to speak, but Laurie's hand on his though hushed him. “But I hope all of you respect,” and he allowed the word to hover in the air, “the sacrifices made by others who have come before and those that are to come. A sacrifice, the sacrifices that have been made are not given knowingly. To those that have made them, sacrifices may always be for nothing. It is only with the grace of God that we can make our sacrifices unknowingly, uncertainly. We dine today thankful not just for what has been given by our family, but by the grace that we have received.”
Papa Al remained standing, as if he had more to say. His deeply lined face was clear, serene, but for eyes that looked into each of us and through us. As he lingered on me – so close to him – it became obvious to me that he was recalling his father whose name I was given. I could discern, too, that in the faces of each of us, he could see the shadows of those who were not present. After that keen silence he sat down; and following another long quiet, the clatter of silver on porcelain woke us all to the meal.
And what a meal. Once the forks and spoons and knives began whirring about there was no stopping us. On either side of the table were bowls full of a fresh green salad, leaves made dark by the sun of an unusually clear winter. Tina and her husband Richard tended a greenhouse through the winter, the early greens in which they swore by and refused to eat any salad fixings from the supermarket. It was tossed with basil, romaine, baby spinach, and shining cherry tomatoes (Tina added, “Now, the tomatoes are still young so they aren't as ripe as they should be,” though not one of us complained); and handsome crumbles of Parmesan topped it off, half of the block, roughly broken in two, sat at the base of each wooden bowl of salad. Olive oil and balsamic vinegar stood like decorative sentinels in slender glass carafes.
Strips of thinly cut garlic and olive focaccia, nearly coated in dried minuscule rosemary leaves and littered with glistening coarse salt, were scattered on platters all over the table. They seemed to be lounging wherever space provided And we all had small bowls already prepped with olive oil for dipping – though many had already swirled in the preferred amount of vinegar.
“I had to bring in something of my own,” Giorgy explained apologetically. “The Parmesan and Gorgonzola aren't even my doing. Shawna at Gallery 22 just got back and, the sweetheart, she just insisted on bringing us all things. Besides, with the breadmaker, I really didn't do much of any work. Honest.”
Near the center of the table was a round tray arrayed, two layers deep of Mickey's stuffed mushrooms. The stuffing was light and golden and flecked with paprika or cayenne – later I learned it was a little of both – with the green onions finely chopped and whipped. Gram had taken the liberty of sprinkling a fine layer of Gorgonzola over them and leaving herself a proud block near her plate which she seemed intent on adding to everything. Mickey jested, “I've made those so many times I doubt Erich would even eat them if he were here. I could do them in my sleep.”
Crowded in the center was the immense casserole dish of slow-cooked lamb's leg. Its cream sauce gravy had filled the whole house – save the smoky study – with its rich aroma, hinted with tarragon, parsley, and a small bundle of cilantro. The bone peered out, as if some overseeing central capitol to the whole table.
“I told you Maria, it would come out just fine,” Gram teased my mother.
“You were right. I never should have doubted you. It tastes wonderful. I can never get the gravy to taste like you do.” Ma replied, presenting her left palm out as if to surrender while her right forked out a cut of the meat.
“You have to burn the flour as you're preparing the base. It sort of caramelizes it or something, just makes it sweeter somehow.” She smiled through her words, and took a moment to chew. “You've still got plenty of time to master it, don't worry.”
Sharing the central seat of the table with the lamb was the overfilling and just perfectly burnt-on-the-top lasagna. The top had been halfway dressed with prosciutto – demarcating a meatless side for Alecia, Giorgy, and the patriarchs who were always encouraged but never deigned to partake – but it has been immediately lost its uniformity. A brilliant red chunky marinara peered out, its layers dripped over by the dark and creamy béchamel sauce. Layers of meaty portabello were balanced by slivers of zucchini and yellow squash; and over the bulk of it thinly sliced prosciutto. Chunks of Romano cheese and hot, almost flowing ricotta seemed to roll out at every exposed edge.
“Gram, I can't believe you're still making the lasagna leaves from scratch,” Cam said complimentarily as she shoveled out an over-sized piece that miraculously held together.
“Once you start making it, you realize it is just so much better to do it at home. Use real olive oil,” a persistent joke in our household was what constituted real and inadequate olive oil, “and a fresh egg or two. It is so far beyond anything you might find in the store.” Gram's smile gleamed out over the table, the outreached hands and passed around plates being dressed with the central dishes. “But compliment your mother on the marinara. It took me a while, but the Gentilis do know how to make marinara.”
“Ma, when do I get to learn this recipe?” Frankie inquired jokingly, Cam nodding in agreement.
“Well, when you start helping me in the kitchen,” Ma chided playfully, suddenly rosy and youthful with compliments. Cam laughed and with a sly, sharp look Ma seemed to cut her short; then all four laughed together. No one, Cam and Frankie told me, got in the way of Ma in the kitchen except for Gram Gia, and only because of her raw authority in the kitchen. Neither of the two were able to keep up with Ma's demands and strictures which often went without being said, and hence without being known until it was too late. Ma and Gram's laughter, seemed to reflect their knowing or at least kindly acknowledgement of this wise abstention, thus relieving Cam and Frankie (or I, had I been more interested in the kitchen) from culpability.
Conversation continued to ebb and flow around the food. Comments and apologies passed like salt and pepper, compliments poured out like olive oil. The crust of the focaccia had softened and it had dried somewhat, but it went wonderfully with the basil-flavored olive oil and coarse pepper; not to mention the slight bitterness of the greens. Each bite into the cherry tomatoes seemed to exploded in my mouth, commandeering my mouth by overcoming all other flavors. The Parmesan was tangy and briny and recalled eating whole chunks of Romano as an undersized twelve-year-old, just learning to explore the flavors beyond sweetness and salt-heavy snacks. Ma had wanted to be angry, but laughed so hard as I tried to drink as much water as I could.
Mickey's stuffed mushrooms had a meaty, almost nutty indefinable quality. Each bite I followed by a sip of wine, wondering and the interplay the two provided. The filling was loud with creamy sweetness and savory with the slow blooming of green onions, shredded almond, and the leisurely flavor of sage. I stood up, having finished my glass of wine in the midst of the three caps I had snatched from the tray, and made my way around the table, filling each wine glass with the each diner's preference. With a grin and a pat from Laurie, I provided Alecia just a fourth – or maybe a third – of a glass of Riesling from Alta Badia. I figured its chill and modest sweetness would not offend her palate and it had always been a Vincenzi policy to introduce alcohol in its proper setting: Friendly company, a meal, and a familiar air.
I set aside what remained of the mushrooms, but before I could cut into the lasagna and lamb taunting me – the gravy on the lamb seemed to ooze delightfully toward every other dish – Cam jabbed me in the side with her elbow. A crumb of cheese dangled from her lip as she asked, “Lo, how have your women been treating you?” I bought a moment by sipping at my water.
“Asking after anyone in particular?” Cam assumed a sort of romantic check on everyone in the family. I liked to think it was her youth, but she seemed determined to either encourage or protect any affectionate possibilities. She had, in private of course, dug from Giorgy his initial primordial interest concerning Carole. Cam had caught up with Giorgy for lunch at one of his galleries, it just so happened that Carole's friend was one of the artists and was being shown around. She determined that the two had been arranging for this sort of rendezvous for weeks and it was because of Cam that Giorgy had finally made a move.
“Lorenzo, I hope you're not entertaining a harem in the city,” Ma chided affectionately.
“You know me. Sometimes it's all I can do to keep them away,” but I could feel the blush rising, uninhibited by even the modest wine I had enjoyed.
“How's that librarian, Delle?” Cam prodded, blatantly pressing me.
“Shannon, you know well, is a curator and restorationist, not a librarian.” I distracted myself by nibbling on the lamb, though recalling waking up on her office sofa did not seem like appropriate dinner time material. “She's well. Working all the time. Ran into her the other night. She acted like I was just a big bother.”
“No dinner plans yet?” pestered Frankie from opposite Cam. She was leaning back to allow Ma a clearer view of me and to see around Cam. I sighed, thinking of the gathering storm of sardonic womanly advice and encouragement.
“You know how busy a woman like Delle can be.”
“Lo,” Giorgy called from the other end, “I bet she would just love coffee at that little nook you love.”
“Don't you go criticizing Sabeen's. Find me a better cup of coffee, I dare you,” adding a waving hand gesture.
“With you around, you're probably scaring off all her customers,” Cam jabbed. “It would do her well. Maybe you're bringing in the wrong sort of crowd, roughing up the joint.”
“She's a hard nut. I bet she likes the oddballs that follow me around,” I finish with a sharp bite into the lasagna, sending a gaze around incriminating the others as being as strange as anyone else I might see across a table. Cam, Giorgy, Frankie, and Richard chuckle, but Ma does not take criticism of the family as smoothly and sends an icy stare my way.
It didn't get to me. I shoveled in a second bite of the lasagna, a piece of the prosciutto rolls over my tongue and I dabbed at my watering mouth as the succulent peppery taste catches my attention. The pasta is just faintly firm inside despite all its treatment. The rich béchamel sauce hits first, but is quickly overcome by a modest but notably spicy marinara, tinged with arrabbiata herbs and peppers. A crunch into a copse of dried red peppers and it heats my mouth and brings the slightest hint of satisfied tears to my eyes. And like a signal was sent, the rest dissolves into the vegetable certainty of the zucchini and squash. I chew longer than normal, not wanting the bite to vanish despite the hunk still lounging on my plate.
“I don't know how the lasagna could be better,” I eventually say, inciting a second round of compliments to the chefs. Cam jostled me just slightly in order to acknowledge my shift in the conversation. I gave her a childish sideways smile and shoved a chunk of lamb in my mouth. Its flavor and richness hit with bullet celerity. It must have been slowly cooking for hours. The weight simply dissolved into a medley of warm intonations. My kid's smile was swept away by a sort of stupid grin as the tarragon and parsley and abundant even milder tones rose out of the certainty and satisfaction of the tender meat. I snorted with a sort of base gluttony after swallowing; just enjoying everything as if it were made just so. And I suppose in the case of the meal, it was.

...

Chapter 14

Somehow we had managed to clean our plates. Ma, Lynn, Frankie and Laurie were tidying up. The rest of us were playing musical chairs getting to the bathroom or lounging around. Fresh coffee was brewing and I smelled the familiar accents of Sabeen's coffeehouse. I took comfort in knowing the cache I provided Ma was still around. Though I noticed that a second pot was brewing in a maker and realized that it was decaf. I recognized the sleight of hand intended to cater to doctor's orders for my father, Papa Al, and anyone else with such preferences.
“Anything in New York that can compete with a meal like that?” I inquired pointedly toward Michael. He had remained rather subdued throughout the meal, smiling and nodding rather than openly complimenting the dishes or those who had prepared them.
“I don't know when I last ate so much, Lorenzo.” He let a smile roll over his lips. Michael was chronically indisposed to flattery, even when polite, and this sort of sideways line was the closest he would get.
“Lo,” Laurie chimed in, reaching between Alecia and Michael, to heft the lasagna dish of the table, “you know this is the best meal he's had in weeks.” After depositing the casserole dish on the counter, she came back and laid a small kiss on Michael's cheek.
“What sort of case are you working on?” Alecia quietly ventured. Her voice retained a high eloquence. It wasn't child-like but neither was it adult. I recalled that Laurie had been a member of various choirs and, once or twice, sang in amateur operas. That control and mastery of sound had enchanted me as a child and something of it seemed to have been passed on to Alecia.
“Talking business at the table? Isn't that dangerous ground?”
“It's after dinner. Talk away,” Frankie replied, as if suggesting that the meal was what was keeping us all here. She was cutting into some sort of tart that had been warming in the oven, setting pieces decked with raspberries onto trays. Despite not feeling like I could consume another bite, my mouth watered at the sight.
“A missing person,” I stated, looking directly at Alecia. Her eyes, brown tinged with flecks of green, stared directly at me. The green only seemed to come out now that the sun was set and we had resorted to the soft light of lamps; a Tiffany describing a boat sailing on the ocean in the frontroom cast beautiful cerulean, viridian, and white hues in all directions. For just the briefest moment, those eyes looked hungry and I shiver surprised me.
“Who? What happened?”
“I can't say. It might offend my client.”
“But why is he missing?”
“So far it seems to be of his own volition,” and this, I realized, was almost the truth. Adler had allowed himself to be swept up into Stiletto's game of hearts and flesh.
“Then why are you involved?”
“Sometimes people don't make the best decisions.”
“So he has to get out of something?”
“Well, he's a missing person, isn't he?”
“Why aren't the police involved? Why you?”
“You don't think I have a reputation that stands on its own?”
Alecia chuckled and I could tell she was imagining me being spoken of in the shrouded corners of good-for-nothing bars.
“Sometimes, especially when someone isn't making the best decisions, getting out of what you're in requires... discretion.” And the word sunk into her. Her brow knotted and cheeks flushed. I recalled the story of her getting out of the stay-at-home salons the Castavets and their socialite crowd had assembled. She had hated it and had managed, even if only into an absurd sounding elite prep school, to wriggle out of it.
Laurie set the saucer and coffee down in front of Michael and Alecia just enough to break my thoughts. It seemed to sing ever so slightly, to call back. I couldn't figure if everyone else had been listening or if Alecia and I had simply been so caught up to ignore everything else.
“Thank you, Laurie.”
“Thanks Mom.”
Laurie leaned down and whispered, “Decaf. You're not staying up all night.”
“Mom. You know I drink this stuff all day. Its the only thing you can get in the school that's not soda or milk.”
“I don't care,” she said, letting a protective smile shine down on Alecia.
Frankie balanced four cups, each with a spoon teetering at the edge. Richard half-stood and took one from each hand. She had been a barista through college and though Richard appreciated her deftness at a cappuccino or Americano – let alone a jackhammer after a three or four hour night – he was the type to protect her as much as possible. Some shift in he wait, some flash of recollection on her face I might catch suggested some knowing on his part, some fear of veiled fragility, but it had never been something she had spoken of to me. Discretion. We were inevitable practitioners of it.
“How long are you all staying?” Cam asks of the Castavets, though looking mostly at Alecia. The two, at least according to Cam, share a rapport and she is eager to get to know her cousin better.
“Tonight and the morning. Lynn is joining us for brunch. Then we're off again,” Michael curtly replies. His shortness comes off as punchy and disinterested. Perhaps he is deliberately avoiding what might get him into trouble.
“Where are you staying?” and Cam knows that it won't be here or with any of the family. She's prodding, as usual.
“Sheldon at the firm has a home out here. Borrowed the keys for a few days. Small, I guess, but it'll do.” His eyes glanced around as he said small, his condescension seeping out despite himself.
“You know, if Alecia ever wants to come down for a weekend, one of us,” she adds a coffee cup flourish to Frankie and me, “would be happy to host. She could catch the train after class.” All the while she looked almost exclusively at Alecia, though casting a glance at Laurie whenever possible.
“Oh, we'll have to see,” Michael began.
“That would be great,” Alecia spurts out, overeager but only slightly loud. “Mom, you think I could?”
“It sounds splendid, if someone has time to take you in,” Laurie adds, returning to her seat. “But what would you do? None of your friends are here. What would you see?”
“I could use it for a history paper, or an English paper. Write about the historic places here. Sightseeing and stuff. I could see what Cami's doing at school. What if she gets that internship? I could see the business and everything,” her voice got away from her, louder than she realizes, but Cam is soaking it up.
“Sweetheart, it is getting late. We can talk about this tomorrow,” Michael responds, trimming his words; a general smelling insurrection in the ranks.
“You all only just got here. It is just the dead of winter and it seems late,” I add. Everyone has gathered around the end of the table in the frontroom or has rearranged the furniture and tables for small talk.
“After the long drive, we're all a little tired,” Michael stated, wanting to end the conversation.
“Before you go anywhere, have desert,” Ma says, swooping in with plates of apple raspberry tart. “Lynn made it especially since you were coming in.”
“Don't tell them that. You're going to embarrass them.” Lynn was already blushing as she replied.
“Well you did. And it looks like I've embarrassed you,” Ma adds, taking a bite as she nearly collapses onto the sofa. “But it is just wonderful.”
“Thank you, Maria. I do try.”
And it was wonderful. The crust was buttery and light, but crisp as well. Its sweetness conflicted with the coffee, but I interspersed the bites and the drinks with sips of water. The raspberries were tart and fresh, the late ripening apples were sweet and crisp, just slightly caramelized in the oven. A almond flavored custard was the base and after so much rich food, it seemed like the straw to do us all in.
Everyone was in the mood for lounging and reflective, reminiscent conversation. The evening slipped away and so did all the attendees. Despite Michael's efforts, the Castavets were not the first to leave. Richard and Frankie complained of a long day cleaning before and an early morning to follow. Their departure foresaw the gradual exit of everyone.
“Laurie, Michael, I am so glad you brought Alecia with you,” Frankie said from the door. Though she had hugged and kissed everyone, Ma and Alecia came by for a second adieu. “We don't see enough of her, you know.”
“I'll come down and see everyone more. Don't worry,” Alecia added, just a hint of petulance in her voice. The affection surprised Frankie and when she turned to hug Richard, with peculiar force, he was taken aback.
I stepped back from the entrance toward Cam.
“What's gotten into her? She's just thrilled,” I whispered, expecting some caprice somewhere.
“I gave her my phone number. And yours. Told her, 'In case you end up at the train station.'”
“Love to cause trouble.”
“Lo,” and she leaned in close to say, “she hates it up there. The school, the kids, the parents. She's got to get away or else she's going to think that's all there is.”
I nodded and smiled at the mischief. Though Cam enjoys her games, it was clear that her concern for Alecia was genuine. Her brow was just faintly furrowed and it surprised me to see her so capable of restraining herself. Cam, having seen so many frustrations and crises, managed to pull together a more mature and sharper sense of the world than I ever expected. She was clearly capable and aware of her own capability. I thought of Alecia learning the ways of Cam, the good it would do her to see a young but potent woman. While Giorgy rousted Mickey and Lynn from their near dosing fatigue for the ride home, Mickey and Richard already had their coats on and were about to set out into winter's night. Yellow streetlamps gave the low rolling snowbanks an unwholesome tinge and I felt a protective impulse rise up, raising my pulse just before I could settle it again. Following more hugs and vague assemblages of plans for lunch or dinner or coffee, the other three were out the door.
“Do you want to stay here tonight, Lo? We have the space,” Ma asked. The house had four bedrooms and only two were in regular use for my folks and Gram. Papa Al, though not a regular guest, had already nodded off in one of the chairs in the study and would shortly be hauled upstairs by my father and I. Cam often slept there when the schoolwork and internships stacked up. Even if she were to stay, I recalled more than one night of sleep on the couch.
“Cam,” I asked, “are you planning on staying?”
“No. Too much to do. Asking for a ride?”
“I suppose so. I'd appreciate it.”
“Consider it done.”
“Lorenzo, you look like a night home would do you well,” my father called from the kitchen. He was already digging around, looking for more tart or other treat to pilfer. He hadn't seemed to notice the absence of caffeine in his coffee even with the rapid onset of the night.
“Too much to do tomorrow. Besides, I have more work I can take care of tonight.”
“Don't go out again tonight. You'll make us worry,” Ma added. It was her way to end any get-together with a call for caution. With her loving warning, my father and I ventured into the study to help my grandfather into one of the upstairs beds. My mother, though a more than competent chef, had never mastered the art of housekeeping. The bed was ruffled and the room stale smelling. It had, years before, been my room. I had given up that sense of ownership years before and had helped install new wallpaper. That act, that tearing down and covering over, had had an especially cathartic sensation attached. It was the putting away of childish things, but also the forgetting of traumas I had labored to place behind me. It was now simply a room, often for a guest and occasionally for family, but usually only occupied by the old rolltop desk and the Remington hidden within. It was good to be up here, as much to recognize what I had left behind as what I still had.
“Lorenzo,” my father began after we had removed Papa's shoes and shifted him under the blankets, “the work, it isn't something for us to worry about.” He stated it, unsure of how to ask this question that was also a demand and a request. His tone was low, subdued after the getting the Old Man upstairs. He always called his father that, Old Man, as if it might somehow stave off his own aging.
“You worried that it'll be like before.” Again, that balancing of tone between intentions. Was it a statement or a question? In the ensuing silence, neither of us were sure.
“Those were not good times.” Fear and anger bloomed like a spark in my stomach, but I swallowed and kept it down. I thought of the patterns behind the wallpaper – a simple series of vertical stripes, like bars of pleasant dull colors – and realized that I had forgotten it. Whatever it was, I knew I hated it and that Jules, my father, had somehow assumed he had the right to bring it up. Heat came rushed up into my cheeks and I struggled for words.
“Not again. Not like that.”
“That is all we ask. It was your trial and all we could do was stand by.”
“No more trials,” but it came out hoarse. I swallowed a breath like bitter medicine and cleared my head. “Let's go,” and I moved out the door before he could disagree. I felt a brush of air, perhaps he had reached out, but my back was turned and I was prepared to leave.
Gram was at the foot of the stairs waiting for us so that she might go to bed. She held three stacked containers of food and I could see that Cam, behind her, had the same. Cam wore a smile of quiet acceptance, knowing that she would hand off the lamb to a friend or roommate; it was only in the Vincenzi House that she ate meat, unable to explain her reasonings to the chefs.
“You and Cam, you let yourselves get so thin. If you need me to cook you a good meal, I'll be out there without a second thought. You know that, right?”
“Of course I do, Gram. I'm just busy these days. Off of one case and onto the other. I take care of myself as best I can. Besides, I've always been thin.”
“Don't tell me that. I know your mother fed you very well growing up.”
“I tried, at least,” Ma chimed from the kitchen, putting the last of the food away before setting rickety knob for the timer on the dishwasher.
“Oh, you did just fine Maria.”
“Here, here,” seconded my father, still standing a few steps up. “Gram, let's let these two get back into the city. I'll take you up to bed.”
“You know I can get up and down these stairs like anyone else.”
“I know. Just let me play the gentleman.”
“That, I guess, I can oblige.” Cam and I gave her hugs and kisses on the cheek, each of us feeling that extra tug of not wanting us to go followed by that push, that recognition that we would. Quietly intoned affectations and salutations and she wobbled only a little as Pa helped her toward her room. Cam looked at me, wondering if we should wait for a final adieu to him before leaving, and my look of readiness and the red still on my cheeks told her no, it was time to go.
“Now give me a kiss,” Ma said coming in while rubbing off the last of the marinara from her hands. She looked at us, wondering happily at her children, telling each of us in the silent language of mothers how much she cared for and thought of us. And then we were out the door, the cold mocking us for inadequate jackets and hats and gloves. We were in the car, a common petite blue two-door sedan, rubbing our hands together and firing up the engine and not even bothering that the music was too loud.
I had thought we would talk. That Cam and I had catching up to do, gossip to share, concerns about family and friends; but the music was never turned down and the streetlights seemed to draw me into the night, through the windshield, into an absurd close cosmos. Absently, I pointed down the proper street, mentioned something about construction and detours, but the words were surely lost in the lolling late evening radio. I spoke my thanks more clearly and looked at her; faint, tired smiles reflected on our faces and it was enough. I reached over and squeezed her shoulder, not knowing what it was meant to say, but when she set her own hand on my own I knew whatever wordless awareness had been conveyed.
She handed me the stacked container of food and before I made it to the door, she had driven off.

Grumbles

2011-06-21T10:02:00.000-07:00

So... an aside.

I am researching for my thesis and realizing the limitations of the NAU Cline Library. Perhaps I long for the cramped, hunchbacked floors of Love Library at UNL; or the comfortable and nook-filled quaintness of Gustavus's Folke Bernadotte. Whatever it is, I am frustrated. First of all, in looking into housing issues, the most recent resources are inevitably other theses and dissertations. Unfortunately, these are almost exclusively limited to the universities where they were written. Not only that, but even if they were written in the last two years, let alone in the last ten, they are on paper only. Why? Why do we not have a digital compendium of theses that have not been privately published? Why do libraries not make the effort to store a few megabytes of for their theses on their databases? Bah.

So I am digging around with WorldCat (one of my favorite resources, I must say) and cannot shake the sense that I am pestering a half dozen librarians by requesting material from all over the continent, and even a conference proceedings from Stockholm. (Canadian grad students seem to be very interested in cooperative housing.) I recall reading about Ray Kurzweil's text-to-speech reader, an enormously helpful invention for the visually impaired. But with GoogleBooks raiding of libraries a bookstores - an endeavor I have mixed and generally critical feelings about - it seems that taking a thesis and putting it online would be fairly straightforward. Perhaps I am just asking GoogleBooks to support an immense thesis reservoir, a project I imagine would garner sympathy in the graduate student crowd.

Anyway, I can't let my session expire, but wanted to rant a little. If anyone has similar experience or solutions, let me know. Also, I have great respect for librarians and understand some of their various responsibilities, hence feel that whatever projects I partake ought to be as easily taken care of as possible.

Post-Script: I am using WorldCat to get ahold of some of Kenneth Grant's works to help me flesh out my Lovecraftian detective story. If you have read any of what I have written, or have spent a little too much time exploring Lovecraft and the like, Grant plays an important role. Grant links Lovecraft's writing to the occult revival in peculiar but interesting ways. I feel sort of silly about it, but also undeniably excited.

Strawberry Crumble

2011-06-20T10:44:00.001-07:00

My mom sent me off with homemade preserves. It is sort of a tradition these days. The strawberry preserves were part of a pretty runny batch, though, and rather than try and dress some toast or oatmeal with it, I decided to make a crumble.

Strawberry Crumble
Line an 8x8 baking dish with parchment paper. Fill the bottom with strawberries (in lieu of preserves or frozen berries) and be generous.
Allow to warm in the oven if wet (350 F)

3/4 c whole wheat pastry flour
3/4 c oats
2 Tbsp sugar
1/4 tsp salt
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 Tbsp almond extract (or sliced almonds)
Mix with a wooden spoon until even.

1 stick (8 Tbsp) butter, cold and diced
Add to dry ingredients and rub by hand until you have a breadcrumb texture. If the butter starts to soften, allow to chill in the freezer for a few minutes. Pull out strawberries from oven and sprinkle "crumbs" evenly over strawberries. Bake until golden brown, about 25-35 minutes. Allow to cool and serve.

Note: This is a rushed and estimated recipe. I have yet to taste it at the time of posting.
Follow Up: It came out like a tasty ice cream topping. I have added parchment paper and recommend more strawberries. The "crust" is tasty, but it did not come out of the pan with anything like ease.

Emptiness: Reflection on Caves

2011-06-13T14:11:00.000-07:00

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.

~Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching (Le Guin translation)

...

As I plumbed the depths of Entering Darkness by Sam Anderson I kept thinking about the roles of caves, depths, abysses, and the like. The most obvious to a philosophically minded type is Plato's Allegory of the Cave in which the inquiring and gradually enlightened soul frees him/herself (Plato was pretty progressive for the an Ancient Athenian) from the chains and illusions of a subterranean world. Anderson, though, raises the topic of ancient cave drawings and the ways in which caves allow for mystical encounters with the more-than-human or even the primally human world. (Anderson opens up with Werner Herzog's "Cave of Forgotten Dreams.") Just such a mindset shined a novel light on Plato's Allegory.

If caves are places of encountering the mystical - even Anderson points out the tradition, shared by Plato's contemporaries, of building shrines in caves - but are philosophically considered realms of illusion, then what exactly is Plato suggesting we escape from? Is their a historical subtext in the Allegory that Plato is stripping away not just the ever-changing reality of immediate experience for the "ideal forms" he propounds later in the Republic, but attacking a more foundational reality of his society? Anderson himself waxes about the magical experience one haves within a cave, fascinated by the artifacts and impressions of previous travelers (footprints and handprints captivate him) as much as the shrouded, dank world of strange life found therein. Does Plato argue that this is purely illusory? Are these experiences less than genuine?

But I think that either this reading or this evaluation - my fault or a critique of Plato - is misinformed. Or rather, it is rational but ill-advised. Lovecraft writes in "At the Mountains of Madness,":

It would be cumbrous to give a detailed, consecutive account of our wanderings in that cavernous, aeon-dead honeycomb of primal masonry - that monstrous lair of elder secrets which now echoed for the first time, after uncounted epochs, to the tread of human feet. This is especailly true because so much of the horrible drama and revelation came from a mere study of the omnipresent mural carvings.

The peculiar perversity of the "primal masonry" is mirrored by Anderson, "A cave is a paradox: a placed defined by its absence. It operates on a time scale that we can't even begin to coprehend - a time scale that is, in fact, obscene to any species that cares about life and tends to measure things in minutes and years and decades." Anderson even touches on the point of the Tao Te Ching - though I believe he misidentifies a paradox - in that emptiness is where function, where meaning exists. I think Lao Tzu (and Le Guin) would appreciate the cave as a place of peculiar meaning and clarity for this sort of emptiness.

Lovecraft, though, will not so easily be brushed aside. The magic that Anderson experiences, both in childhood memory and more recent recollection, taps into the abyssal, alien, even cosmic knowledge that torments Lovecraft's protagonist(s). The knowledge that is revealed by caves, why I believe that captivated Paleolithic and Neolithic humanity so much (Herzog's project is as much these people as what remains of them) is profoundly interior and potentially tormenting. Anderson writes, "A cave, in other words, is time showing off. Most geological features form slowly, of course, but caves seem extramiraculous because of the intricacy, the beauty and the delicacy of the structures — all created not by plate tectonics or giant rivers but by individual drops of water. It’s like painting the Sistine Chapel with an eyelash." This encounter with the near infinity of geologic time impresses one with the minuscule reality of human existence, one of the hallmarks of Lovecraft himself.

Lovecraft's frightful tension is the result, I believe, of a modern mind confronting the immediacy of a magical universe. Caves and how they reverberate in our psyches is in part because they place us simultaneously in ourselves and in our world. The travel inward, into the Earth itself, is an exploration of our world as it reflects who and what we are. In the alien, we acknowledge the unknowns of who and what and how we are. These are the foundational philosophical inquiries. (Anderson comments that caves remain unknowns, remain "deep" and "profound," the latter coming from the Latin profundus: "before the bottom"; which I'd like to add shares its root with to found, as in a city or building, and foundational, as in the bottom or bedrock.) I recollect Thoreau saying of Walden Pond, "A lake is the landscape's most beautiful and expressive feature. It is earth's eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature. The fluviatile trees next the shore are the slender eyelashes which fringe it, and the wooded hills and cliffs around are its overhanging brows." But if that is the case, what then can we make of a cave?

The cavernous opening is deeply startling. Anderson refers to one as "a black hole," which is scientifically speaking a gaping whole in the fabric of the cosmos. The cave mouth is the entrance through the our usual earthly world. From within, though, Anderson sees that the mouth becomes a mimic of the sun, a strange source of light in the distance. The mouth is a hologram, a play of light that from one side is Nothingness and from the other is Sky, is Cosmos. Spinoza writes of a worm in the bloodstream, unaware of being in a body that is its entire universe; from the vantage of the cave, we are able to explore the body of the world within the within. (An odd corollary to Bruce Sterling's blog, Beyond the Beyond.) Strangely, I think Thoreau and Lovecraft are in unknowing agreement about the anxiety beneath the skin of the world; it is within that our mystic connection, that our earthly cosmos is most intimately experienced and most obviously contradicting our contemporary rational minds. From within we can no longer tell ourselves we are outside - an objective world, an objective Nature, a spiritual landscape - and then as we resurface we know our own amazement at the world anew.

...

"(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)"
~from The Amazing Day by e.e. cummings

Haiku - Pages, Walnut, Warriors, Lovers, Ghosts; Also, Pumpkin Bread

2011-06-12T14:33:00.000-07:00

I
Lost flesh, like pages
newly turned, embodies
my sun-borne blessings.

II
Leaf & nut & bough
greenly interweave summer's
reborn tapestry.

III
The hundred-legged
warriors patrol their rich,
decadent domain.

IV
Deirdre's stolid
lovers have made a harem
of our street corners.

V
Ghosts strum guitars
upstairs & wonder where they
last knew their lovers

...

Summer is a wonderful time to be in Flagstaff. Even our dusty yard has become verdant, even if its bounty are weedy grasses and the like. The black walnut tree is brilliantly green, the slender branches - having regrown from a stump when the various, primary trunks broke in a storm years ago - are not yet full of little, woody nuts; but I love it all the same. My compost is dark from inattention, but full of its own rambling world. When I first opened it, the potato scraps had sprouted and were tall but frail. Miss Nina has already commented on the pollen that encases her bicycle whenever she takes it out for a ride - though I have been pretty immune to the allergens up here. After reading from Gary Snyder's Mountains and Rivers Without End, I felt inspired to return to my haiku practice, especially since friends have commented on how certain songs stand out.

I separate out I and V ("Pages" and "Ghosts") from the others, though I post them here chronologically. (I feel that names for haiku are not exactly needed and can detract from the unity a haiku suggests to me.) I have spent a good amount of time in the sun since getting out of school and it has treated me well, though it would be wise to be more respectful of sunshine. I have tanned and burned, more the former than the latter, and for the first time in probably nine months my legs have seen some blue sky. I wasn't especially conscious of it and the mild burn is concluding. I do not think of myself as macabre, but I have taken to the rather unseemly habit of tending to the peeling skin. I know, it is unpleasant, but I can tell the change in skin tone and new freckles and it has a strange sense of discovery. Also, the sense that the sun has played such an obvious part in changing my appearance, my makeup is weirdly exciting.

The last haiku - inspired by the playing of our new upstairs housemate - I feel is rather flat in terms of subject matter, but is a pleasure to annunciate. It has a clearer manifestation of poetic strategies (assonance, consonance, alliteration, meter) than most anything I write. I am reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance in which the narrator - a modestly fictionalized incarnation of the author - describes, among other things, the teaching style of a typical rhetoric class. He disparages the emptiness of imitative learning and systematic evaluation of writers' rhetorical methods. He is under the supposition that most good pieces can be evaluated in terms of style after the fact, but are not initially intended by the author to use one strategy or another. I include V, despite anxiety about it, because I recognize the pleasure of its sound, not so much the sense of its meaning.

Oh, and I made pumpkin bread this morning. The recipe would look something like this:

Pumpkin Oat Breakfast Bread (for Jo and her gardeners)
2 cups oats
2 cups whole wheat flour
2 cups white or whole wheat pastry flour
1 Tbsp salt
1 Tbsp baking powder (maybe more at lower altitudes)
2 Tbsp cinnamon
2 tsp nutmeg
2 tsp ground ginger (optional)
1 cup walnuts or other nuts (optional)

In a bowl, mix dry ingredients until even. Set aside.

1 large can of pureed pumpkin (or fresh if available, can replace with other squash)
1 cup plain yogurt (I like to bake with whole, but used low fat for this)
1 stick (8 Tbsp) butter, cut into small pieces
1-2 Tbsp honey
2 tsp vanilla or almond extract
1/3 cup turbinado sugar (or your preference)

Mix or blend together until even. Butter should remain obvious and unconsolidated. Will end up with a lighter loaf if blended. Gradually add in dry ingredients, stirring together constantly. Scoop into greased bread pan(s) (see note below) and bake at 400 F for 45-60 minutes; cover with foil if it starts to burn.

Notes: I remembered with this that baking with yogurt can be tricky because a toothpick or fork will come out clean even if the center is still... yogurty. I pulled mine out at about 35 minutes and wished I had covered it and let it bake the whole time. Also, I split this between two bread pans, but think it wiser to use either small bread pans or to put in one and cover immediately with foil to bake more evenly. Of course, every oven is a little different and, without eggs, a soft spot in the middle is perfectly edible. (I recall Miss Breanna rather enjoying doughy centers.) As with most of my recipes these days, the flour balancing is an educated guess and recommend dabbling and adapting.

Dreaming in Italy

2011-06-05T14:16:00.001-07:00

Throughout my trip in Italy I slept poorly. It may have been the foreign beds, the unfamiliar hotel rooms, my snoring father, the remnants of jetlag, or any other of minor concern. The result of which was recalled and vivid dreams. I don't know if it has to do with how I sleep when I sleep poorly or that I am sleeping poorly that makes dreams clear and more energetic for me. Normally, I do not recall much of my dreams even when I am well-rested and rise quickly, but I am often bothered by that elusive sense of having forgotten that dreams leave behind throughout the following day.

I recall, still, running into my (now former) housemate Sam in Flagstaff and catching up with him. There was a peculiar tension as if our landlord - full of his own problematic idiosyncrasies - had shifted his gaze from Sam to Tim and I. There was a sense of uncertain ground, that my housing situation was perturbed and ready to crumble. This may be, in fact, the source of my anxiety that my room would not be waiting for me upon my return to Flagstaff. It seemed a lingering possibility that my room would have been broken into as much by my landlord as by a thief. It is by no means a secure locale, but all of those details had been sorted before I left and I should not have really been so concerned. That said, a rather large number of my glasses, including wine glasses, are not where I left them and I ended up considering Sam the likely, if unintended, pilferer of them even though Sam does not have much preference from wine. How strange it is to be swept up into such assumptions by the ethereal weight of dreams.

Being on the road, and even in Lincoln, I have a strange dreaminess to my perception. Nothing is quite as it should be and nothing stays in place. (As a sidenote, it was the perfect mood with which to watch the Buffy episode "Restless.") Associated with that is the passing of familiar faces in a crowd of strangers - so common for me in airports. Commonly, my dreams will involve amalgamations of friends and family, which was not a trait of most of my dreams in Italy, but encountering strangers and dreamily constructing personae for them left the impressions like characters in a story in my recollections of Italy. Even the peculiar and sometimes painful juxtaposition of familiarity with strangeness, such as the imposition of a foreign language on the mouths of friends, seems a consistent quality of travel and likely played some role - though I often have a passing knowledge of dream-languages - in my dreams in Italy.

Back in Flagstaff, I am relieved by a sense of concreteness, a reality to this place that surprises me. Perhaps it is the crisp, high desert light or the regularity of my sleep schedule, of the return to a more defined sense of my place here that is gradually abandoning my perception of Lincoln. (Though I could say more on this, I have difficulty articulating how I feel both welcomed in Lincoln and both frustratingly misplaced. My life there always seemed out-of-joint with the lives of friends and family there.) What I find so winning about Flagstaff is not as much a quality or experience, but a sort of dialect of how I perceive this place and my presence here. Sensing a comfortable familiarity with a place, for me, is like finally pinning down some grammatical rule in a second language that you weren't even aware you were frustrated over. "Ah, now I understand the future imperfect sense and can say what I will be doing in the indeterminate future." In fact, that is what Flagstaff often is to me in the best of ways: This is where I am managing what I want to have accomplished but am in the process of learning.

Compilation, Letters, and Travels

2011-06-03T15:20:00.000-07:00

So, I have been traveling and am returning to Flagstaff tomorrow. Good times on the roads and skyways, but looking forward to my own quarters again. I trust that I have not been bamboozled in the meanwhile. For you, I have made a mix CD. It is called Wonders of Auto-Liberation, which is a reference to travel reading material. Any guesses? If you want a copy of the mix, email me your address or comment with it or what-have-you. I would be happy to do so. That said, I would like a return letter (paper, snail-mail, that sort of thing) or mix or something other to return the favor.

Wonders of Auto-Liberation, June '11
1. Home (RAC Mix) by Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros
2. The End by Best Coast
3. An old song by Kiki Pau
4. Harlequin Bands by The Lonelyhearts
5. Daughters of the Soho Riots by The National
6. Beg Steal or Borrow by Ray LaMontagne & The Pariah Dogs
7. Same Old Train by T-Model Ford and GravelRoad
8. Sun Hands by Local Natives
9. Jungles by Holy Fuck
10. Mykonos by Fleet Foxes
11. VCR by The xx
12. Roll Up Your Sleeves by We Were Promised Jetpacks
13. Scared as Fuck by An Horse
14. Honey Won't You Let Me In by The Tallest Man On Earth
15. Geography by Thao Nguyen
16. Why Do You Let Me Stay Here by She & Him
17. Surprise Hotel by Fool's Gold
18. Only The Sounds You Made by Tender Forever
19. Poke (Live) by Frightened Rabbit

Projects:
1. Short story about walking, getting lost, and possible becoming found in a European city;
2. A playful, sardonic pamphlet somewhat in the style of The Zombie Survival Guide about passing as a native human while being para/meta/super/non-human (inspired, in part, by X-Men: First Class); and
3. Returning to the detective story I have allowed to fall out of my attention.

And more generally, I hope to spend more time cooking and baking (especially vegan, potentially gluten-free) and providing notes and recipes here. I will be looking for work upon my return to Flagstaff, but hope to accomplish that task promptly and become modestly employed. At the moment, though, I have to pack up for the trip.

What I read for Lauren's Wedding

2011-05-08T10:03:00.000-07:00

The Amazing Day

i thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun's birthday;this is the birth
day of life and love and wings:and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any-lifted from the no
of all nothing-human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

~ e.e. cummings ~

She and Ben know it, but thorough congratulations.

Haiku - Song

2011-04-25T17:30:00.000-07:00

Sit. Listen to the
morning song, wind song, light song
woven into voice.

---

May sit and write on this tonight. I have been too busy for keen senses. I wonder if Janine is right, that I hear and see the world differently. I want to dwell there for a spell, but not just yet.

Moving Outside the Dialogue

2011-04-19T19:51:00.000-07:00

The New York Times has been sponsoring a series of community conversations on NAU campus about various issues concerning sustainability. Community, energy, and now water have been discussed by professors, students, and community members in a casual but critical way. They have brought together members of Flagstaff in exciting ways, similar to Earth Councils that Eric Utne once discussed at Gustavus and, with which, Lauren I believe has been involved. The only problem is that they don't go anywhere.

How do they fail to move anywhere? Well, they generally focus on policy on the federal and state levels which, in terms of sustainability, are going nowhere. In fact, for Arizona much of the conversation seems to be going in the opposite direction. Just yesterday the Governor decided to veto - rather surprisingly - the bill that would allow concealed weapons on university right-of-ways legal. The notion is that an armed student body is safe against the violent aims of unbalanced community members. Of course, having more armed students doesn't seem to perturb a majority of the legislature here. What madness.

So, if we assume an uncooperative set of policy-makers, then the arguments about swaying the hearts and minds of these men and women becomes an unchangeable aspect of the conversation. My friend Jon (affectionately called "Goose") and I have been rather disappointed by these talks for just the reason. If we recognize the limits of the political discourse, it requires us to move outside of that discourse into alternative channels. Our take has been a variety of outreach and community work, social business models and green consulting, and small-scale but widespread problem-solving. If water is the issue, let's retrofit houses for stormwater catchment, graywater utilization, and household or neighborhood-scale natural machines to process wastewater. These reduce household utilization, can build synergies such as water-as-heatsink for passive temperature control, manage community/per-capita water consumption, support green collar jobs, and can transform communities from neutral or resistant to empowered and invested citizens. Jason is involved in Solar Mosaic, a crowd-sourced solar project to augment our carbon-based energy industry, but doing so through community investment (usually through churches) and education.

Many of these initiatives can be conceived as simultaneous environmental, economic, and capacity-building endeavors. Tim and I have discussed cooperative or crowd-sourced/community-owned small enterprises to respond to absences within Flagstaff. I began with my cooperative, green, affordable housing (Resident-Owned Green Urban Equitable Housing, or ROGUE Housing) and use some space from a house as an open bike workshop (perhaps a suggested donation or volunteering for usage) so that Tim and others can build custom bikes in their free time and have the storage to wait until they can be sold. Tim, having noticed that Flagstaff has only one cinema of note, suggested creating a community theatre; my subsequent suggestion was cleaning and renovating a warehouse or factory that has fallen out of use, whitewashing a wall, bringing in a projector and sound system (surprisingly affordable second-hand), and requesting donations and advertising via zines to avoid copyright violation by making events pseudo-private. While we're at it, Tim can employ his recording experience and we can make the warehouse/factory-gone-cinema into a recording studio for local artists.

What is the end product? Well, a series of cooperatively owned and managed affordable houses that demonstrate green living. You have a community bike workshop that provides entertainment, services, and adds to the unique accents of Flagstaff. Similarly, a zine allows us to publish work going on in the houses and the workshop while "advertising" for the theatre and studio. The theatre - because of its semi-private qualities - is open to the entire community at minimal cost and can show second-string movies, arthouse films, and independent projects. Given proper time and sound management, the studio provides an affordable space for musicians while attracting amateur and experimental technicians and artists. Through all of this is the network of communication and involved citizens creatively employed (albeit in a limited way) in creating the Flagstaff they want to live in. Besides, there is a richness in the self-satisfaction and anarchic, but cooperative design of such a structure of development.

The issues at play are, of course, finances, time, and skills. I have begun to think of ROGUE Housing as coming out of tax incentives and grant funds which lead into economic self-sufficiency. If managed properly with reclaimed materials and labor is mostly volunteer (Learn skills! Work Hard! Build Community! slogans and vintage style posters come to mind.) then the organization can build a fund to lead into other projects. I hope to learn about tax codes and claiming property through paying taxes on unclaimed spaces over the period of a few years. I believe this works through assuming responsibility for three or more years and then appealing for the deed from the city or county. If I am able to declare ROGUE Housing a business of some variety, I believe I can leverage it for loans or grants in the future; the subsequent reality is repayment, but if these decisions are democratically made through the organization then I hope crowd-sourcing is highly likely.

Oddly, I have become increasingly concerned with social needs and realities despite the environmental stress placed on the American Southwest. Coal and uranium mining, coal power, dammed rivers, water scarcity, and more plague this region. The mythos of the West has resulted in a macho attempt at domestication and domination of this landscape. Unfortunately, the very recent habitation of this region by Anglos deprives much of the population with any sort of historical identification with the land. I, of course, am part of that cultural even if I am an heretic amongst the believers. (I appropriate this turn of phrase from Donna Haraway who explains her diction in The Cyborg Manifesto.) I believe if we retool our society for human connectivity then we prepare ourselves for connectivity to the more-than-human world. Without a firm sense of the human within the world, then I doubt transformation is likely. This work, while constructive in its own right, is about precipitating - which I mean richly, that we are fostering the potential for - the change we need.

Haiku - Walker

2011-04-07T08:28:00.000-07:00

Becoming a walker -
in space, in time - measuring
distance by footfalls.

...

I may have included this in the daily journal assignment. I wrote - or rather spoke - it then on my way to work. Only yesterday did I get back in my bike again. A month or two on foot; I am thankful for the change of pace but will certainly appreciate the celerity of being on Nicolai again.

Haiku - Bottles

2011-03-31T11:09:00.000-07:00

I gather glass shards
not to recreate, but to
assemble the new.

Haiku - Veils

2011-03-30T14:54:00.000-07:00

Veils obfuscate faces,
make unknown the known only
to numb and occult.

...

I want to write on this more. It is also still rough, but reflects a great deal of my colleague's and my frustrations of late.

Haiku - Halos

2011-03-29T17:09:00.000-07:00

and they walk in with
halos, like everyday saints;
each voice is hymnal.

...

Studying at Macy's, the sunset smeared across the sky through the ambiguous clouds, I was struck when an acquaintance entered and greeted me. I knew her through her voice, the light blinding me to her appearance. I thought of the ways we see one another, the ways we see the world. The light, as it was, and the silhouette - voiced but unknown - heartened me mysteriously. I cannot say exactly how. The scene, the act, it left space for magic, for the divine. Macy's is explicitly Bahai'i and the space is inflected by that. Also, I recently recounted a scene from The Plague by Albert Camus in which the various protagonists converse in the quarantined city. One man says he has been trying to be a saint without God, while the other remarks he has been trying to be a man, to be human, whatever that is. Of course, I am not Camus nor am I stranded in a pestilent city. I wonder if Camus saw saints coming through coffeeshop doorways, or heard the music of their voices when he could not discern friends' faces. I have been interested in returning to church; of course, it is for the community of belief, not the belief itself that draws me. Church opens up space for the divine, for magic to permeate our lives and, though I try to witness that everywhere, sacred spaces are often more permeable than our everyday. Or so I believe. Oh, and one final thing; this is a mild attempt at self-parody given my tendency to enumerate in haiku form; to counter that, I began "in the middle" with "and," left intentionally lower case.

[Note: This entry, minus the haiku itself, was reconstructed from one written in Macy's Coffee House. Internet woes prevented its immediate publication.]

Haiku - Dream

2011-03-25T13:54:00.000-07:00

Green dreams, green places;
opening space for strangers
and loved ones and selves.

...

I dreamed a wonderfully simple dream last night. I was in the backyard showing houseguests the backyard, the compost bin, the rich earth that was blessing the house. The place felt distinctly warm and spiritual, but was a home. Sometimes I fall in love in dreams, and I think I fell in love with that place in that dream, smiling drunkenly at the sloping grassy hill as much as I have to the enamored faces of other dreams.

Haiku - Possibility

2011-03-24T15:54:00.000-07:00

Impossible &
possible, words on lips, held
airborne between us.

Haiku - Peaks & Walking

2011-03-21T21:02:00.000-07:00

I
The Peaks wear cloud crowns,
snow cloaks and ice gowns, alive
with royal blessings.

II
Starless skies gather,
like raindrops in a lake, or
fruit bursting with seed.

...

I would like to explain these (the former is a few weeks old already), but it is late and I must sleep. I will try to post haiku more regularly. It is important to me to commit to these. Taking time for thoughtful repose, concision, care, linguistic tenderness; these, I believe, are part of a good life, actions of good character.

Reflections on Perpetual Catastrophe

2011-03-21T20:12:00.000-07:00

In Ethics of International Development my junior year at Gustavus we read Peter Singer's Famine, Affluence, and Morality on famine in Bangladesh (then East Pakistan). Singer calls for living as frugally as possible - second-hand clothes, simple food, only basic travel, etc. - in order to fund the basic needs of others whose lives are stricken with poverty, malnutrition, and disease. His point is that a child drowning in a lake requires us to save her/him to the same degree that a child across the globe who is starving requires us to act appropriately. Distance is not an argument against ethical treatment.

One criticism that arose in that class is, given our potential to respond to a greater degree if we are financially successful through investing that money - in stocks, business, education - then we may use it to greater end by postponing our ethically motivated charitable expenditures. The issue with this argument is that in the case of crisis - such as the Bangladeshi famine, but by no means the only one - action is required immediately to save lives. That is, we live in a world of perpetual crisis to which we must respond ethically if we are to be good people. In some ways how we ended up in a world of perpetual crisis is beside the point, only that if we are to make good actions, we ought to save lives.

This is a pretty straightforward argument: If you can save a life with little to no harm to yourself (you may get your shoes ruined by leaping into the lake to save the drowning child just as you may not be able to purchase a new pair by feeding one half a world away) then you damn well ought to. Failure to do so means that you are not concerned with good actions and that your absence to deprive yourself of something essentially petty (a new pair of shoes) means you are performing bad actions through inaction. This distinctions Singer from earlier consequentialists (ethicists concerned with outcomes of actions) by incorporating inaction as something we are just as liable for as action.

Now more than ever we seem to be witnessing a world of perpetual crisis. Whether it is in the American heartland where conservatives are putting workers' rights in time capsules and sealing them away for distant generations, or the partial meltdowns (don't let the news tell you otherwise, what is going on is some scale of nuclear meltdown that will leave the facilities irreparable and nonfunctional) in Japan in the midst of a national humanitarian catastrophe, or the madness on more than one front in Libya and elsewhere in North Africa and the Middle East, humanity is showing just how good it is in causing problems. I concede that these are different types and different scales of crises, with different sources and locations and solutions (where solutions exist, at least), but that is why I lump them so. By recognizing the relationships between these crises, we can appreciate the depth and breadth of the problems in which we find ourselves.

What to do with that knowledge? In the first place, we can recognize whatever level of fiscal well-being we enjoy, most of us are able to alleviate some of the suffering in the world by small or large monetary sacrifices. If we understand the ethical premises of Singer, then these are not, though, sacrifices so much as recognizing the basic dignity of persons with whom we share this planet and our own humanity. Deeper appreciation for these crises suggest a larger scope for capacity-building, organizing, and political maneuvering to resolve the conditions that make these crises so, well, perpetual. One way I have attempted to do this, which connects with the first statement, is through lending through Kiva microloans. Microfinance is the providing of small loans to entrepreneurs in the Global South (including the South of the North) to bring them and their communities out of poverty. In addition, these loans can be refunded into a PayPal account or, more easily, reinvested in further homegrown businesses.

Such financing, I hope, builds strong households, strong citizens, and strong communities that can then engage in larger political participation and calls for justice in their municipal, regional, and national governments. In a very different way, unrelated to Kiva, this has been the call in the protests and revolutions in North Africa and the Middle East. These challenges of and changes to government arise from the often latent integrity of oppressed communities rising up, bound in their simultaneous calls for justice, health, participation, and more. How one can participate in such movements from outside is difficult, except in showing solidarity and pressing our own governments to express the same. Secretary Hillary Clinton was recently called out by youth in Egypt for America failing to do just this, while Egyptian protesters voiced their solidarity with Midwest protesters attempting to preserve union and workers' rights. In a way, I would hope this is enough, but I know that it is not.

What lies beneath empowered citizens and communities is the way in which that new potency can precipitate social and policy change. Some of this is through transparency and education. I am deeply appreciative for Julian Assange's public statement of Wikileaks that, "We are not pacifists. We are transparency activists." Why are citizens barred from knowing the activities of their own governments? If governments are "of the people" - a tenant of Western Constitutionalism - then how can we be left in the dark about their activities? I do not consider this lightly, but wish to comment ask, how are we to determine, establish, and maintain a fair and just government if we are unaware of its acts?

It is of little use to ask these questions when people live in poverty and hunger. Colonialism; globalization; ethnic, sexual, and religious marginalization; and, on occasion, natural disasters are some sources for inequality and oppression. Our planet, politics, and places are rife with these problems. To resolve them, I cannot see a better out than responding to the immediate crises of emergency need - water, food, shelter, medicine, sanitation, environmental protection - with the other hand supporting the community-based, grassroots political and economic work needed to built community security. Such security takes many forms - water, energy, food, economic - and helping any, if it is effective, helps all. These are not different crises, they share roots deep beneath us. As we disentangle them and uproot these crises, we must start our cultivars of peace, justice, participation, respect, education, and security to replace it. These roots of crisis are deep, the plant hearty; if we wait too long, it will only take hold again. Start digging and start growing, every moment is precious.

What ever happened to...: Considering Neurons, Social Networking, Bodies & Selves

2011-03-18T20:09:00.001-07:00

So, what happened to me? I guess I have been out since the recipe post a week and a half ago. Even without midterms, I seemed to have made last week stressful and this week has been nice, but still full of homework. Friends, music, drink and so on were definitely part of the past week or so, but it wasn't exactly Cancun around here. So I vanished for a spell and now I have returned.

A comrade from camp, Miss Stephanie, came across some update on her newsfeed on the Facebook and "looked me up," so to speak. Not really, she simply posted on my own wall. I have not heard from her in years and in a way, it is satisfying to hear that sort of echo come out of the past and catch up to me. As a well-loved album ends, "We were always coming back." Social networking allows space for this, but it also suggests that - which is what I said to Miss Stephanie - we can pass one another by so easily we often don't see them at all. (I posted a recent Cat and Girl comic on the tumblr which speaks to this.)

Meanwhile, I am reading Iacoboni, a neuropsychologist, describe how we copy one another, and Hannah Arendt describe action and word as the claiming of the self in the world. (These are excellent reads for one of my core classes.) What connects this? Well, if we can appreciate that speech is significant, that voice is about positing the self into the political (read: socially human) world, then does social media affirm or degrade this? We live in a world burdened by so many people speaking at once, but how do we encourage speech that is also action?

This touches on what I will likely write about for my class, and that is: Are speech and action distinct, or are they of one "body"? In a significant way, they are clearly distinct: One can speak an idea or tell a story without committing to it an any embodied way. But only recently has storytelling been divorced from action. Stories have traditionally been an embodied, lived act. This is still the case in theatre, but oral storytelling is such a rich experience because it is not simply oral in the telling. It is embodied and lived and, well, theatrical and dramatic.

Storytelling in this way incorporates ceremony, mysticism, and good old fashioned magic. It does so by incorporating the audience in the experience of the narrator-actor through, as Iacoboni explains, mirror neurons. The embodied act and the explicit detail of the story (narrative and intention are made explicit through embodiment) allows the audience to be with and in the story itself. They are not far from the story as one often is when reading a book, but one is close or even taken into a particular character of the story.

The written word is successful when, through language, the reader is incorporated in this way. This may happen through the seduction of diction and style, or through rich and identifiable characters, or through the dynamic and engrossing plot or scheme of the story. Each of these is a matter of reconnecting to the embodied tradition. The connection of language is inevitably a connection with voice, a teller of tales who we want to accept and explore; but we are taken in by the visceral, sensual power of that voice because in its clarity the narrator of the person is made clear to us. Characters allow us to embody others within the story, to not just connect but to place ourselves within the skins of others. (Iacoboni argues that this capacity makes empathy and ethical thinking possible, referencing Merleau-Ponty among others.) And the successful spinning of yarns, of rich plots are almost necessarily about world-creation and world-explanation in a mythical capacity, even if it is limited to the explanation of a particular person.

I speak in grander terms than I am prone to first because I think that these are generally the case, and second because I want to emphasize the transformative potential that results from this sort of thinking. This sort of thinking also problematizes social networking just as it empowers it. How do we contain or recreate identities behind the internet identities we craft and that are shown to us? One success of the Facebook, unlike MySpace, was that real college friends were expected to hold one another accountable for their claims on their profiles. That is, the value was on an authentic recreation of your word and action in digital space. This authenticity is voluntary and often extraordinarily superficial. The latter is also the common gripe against Twitter, though I have heard strong counterarguments as that digital space matures.

I am not one to read through my newsfeed, check in on all my friends, or see all their new photos on the Facebook. Most of the time it is superficial and other times it is inauthentic or strictly boring. (Trey Graham of NPR Monkey See and Pop Culture Happy Hour has remarked that photos on the Facebook are essentially the new slideshows families used to subject one another to.) That said, there is a way - one that is not always positive - in which the timeline of one's life is flattened into the realm of the digital through social networking; that is, one can no longer really leave anyone behind. Despite my own preferences - and I am not wasting time on the groups and visibility on the Facebook besides changing to protect my privacy from strangers - a classmate from elementary school is somehow on par with an old coworker, my best friends, my sister-in-law, and the new acquaintances that work with my roommate I hardly know.

We are all in this together. But are we closer or are we further apart?

My answer is that to be further apart, we can do the bland, the inauthentic, and the superficial. But if we are to continue to be embody in digital spaces, then we ought to expect I higher caliber from one another in terms of projecting that voice. I do not mean out-speaking (for which there is a time and a place) so much as harmonizing or creative discord with one another. We have greater questions than ever about ourselves, our voice, and our actions. How do we produce and act honestly? How do we project that and protect ourselves?

I have been thoroughly entertained by The Moth for the past several months. I think that, even in the audio podcasts, The Moth provides a vibrant example of honest and authentic projection of personal voice. Similarly, my work with writing haiku has been a practice in succinct clarity, in tempering my own voice in, hopefully, rich and entertaining ways. As far as action, I see a great many people using the Facebook as a means to project action; I receive invitation to house shows and senior recitals, to protests (not just e-signatures or virtual "days of action") and teach-ins, to community meals and awareness raising events. That said, events that happen "anywhere" or "everywhere" are not, in any honest way, events. If we are to project our voices, we have to compliment that with our bodies; without that, who and what have we become?

Various Recipes

2011-03-06T16:01:00.000-08:00

Blue Cornmeal Pizza Crust

Made this yesterday afternoon for the potluck and party for Achieving Sustainable Communities at Emily's. Julia got all flustered when I tried to explain the recipe off the top of my head (and slightly off my head). So here is a more structured go. This is a rough translation of what I made:

Starter
4 cups warm water
2 cups white flour
2 cups cornmeal (blue, or any color, really)
about 1 Tbsp sugar

Stir up thoroughly and allow to rest at least one hour.

Dough
1/2 cup olive oil
1 cup cornmeal
1-2 cups whole wheat or white flour
1 Tbsp salt

Stir in, adding wheat/white flour as needed. You may need to add more than this, but you want a soft, sticky dough to make the dough workable into a crust. Turn out on floured counter - feel free to use plenty of flour, white has the most flexibility - and need until even, 5-10 minutes. Pour a few tablespoons of olive oil into the bowl and spread around, toss in dough and coat. Cover bowl and allow to rest at least an hour or until ready to use

Turn out on lightly floured counter, sprinkle with further flour, and press or roll out as much as preferred. The crust bakes well as a thick, crunchy crust, but you can allow to proof before dressing and baking. Pizza will bake in 20-25 minutes on 425 F, but is sensitive to placement and other contents.

~~~

Walnut Pasta Sauce

This is a semi-regular dish, though I define it and spiff it up a little for Zoey who asked for recipes.

1/4 c olive oil
2 cloves garlic, coarsely chopped
1/2 an onion, diced
1/2 c halved or coarsely chopped walnuts
1 small tomato, chopped coarsely (easiest with a bread knife, in my experience)
--- Can sub with half a can of tomatoes
About 1/2 c fresh or 2 Tbsp dried herbs (oregano, parsley, rosemary, thyme are recommended)
pinch of coarse salt and pepper
Cooked pasta (I always eye how much pasta I want, this would probably be enough for three normal people or two Calebs.)
Romano cheese

Heat oil in a pot, saute garlic and onions for about 30 seconds, toss in walnuts and saute for another minute. Add tomato, herbs, salt, and pepper simultaneously and allow to warm up and the herbs to saturate. Optionally, allow to simmer to saturate dry herbs and cook down (especially with canned tomatoes). Throw in pasta and allow to heat thoroughly, but not to cook anymore. When it is warm and steaming, serve and enjoy. Romano is one of my favorite cheeses and I recommend grating it over top.

~~~

Easy Canned Black Bean Salsa

Salsa is expensive. Canned veggies are pretty cheap. For parties or lazy dinners, I like to make a little salsa to be enjoyed on chips or burritos.

2 Tbsp oil
1 small onion, diced
4 cloves garlic, minced or thoroughly chopped

Saute together until tender.

1 large can tomatoes
1/2 can green chiles or jalapeños (to your own taste!)
cayenne pepper (to preference, I use 1/2-1 teaspoons, probably. I just shake it till it looks good)
1 Tbsp paprika
2 Tbsp oregano, dry
2 Tbsp parsley, dry
1 can black beans, drained

Add all the tomatoes and peppers (the peppers you may want to cook for a while for a different taste), allow to cook down somewhat. Add in the spices, which can be modified as needed (once again, this is more something I throw together) and the drained beans. Stir regularly while it simmers for about ten minutes. This freezes just fine, but three bowls at about this recipe were taken care of at the housewarming party. I have had fun adding a few more veggies here and there and, if you can, use fresh herbs; fresh herbs make everything better. Usually, the canned goods have enough salt so I don't bother with any.

~~~

Egg & Potato Skillet

I made this just the other morning and Tim kept oohing and awing, so it might be worthwhile

1.5 Tbsp butter
1 potato, diced
2 eggs (Go for cage-free local if possible! This is an ethical recommendation.)
1.5 Tbsp dried herbs
Dash of salt
1/4 cup salsa
Shredded cheese added to preference

Saute potato in a pan until beginning to brown. Add eggs and scramble them together before adding salt, herbs and salsa. Allow the salsa to cook down a little, 3-5 minutes. When the potatoes are tender, serve. Dress with cheese as you like.

~~~

The focaccia is a repost, but it is a pretty reliable recipe and thought it might appreciate some more attention. This can be baked as breadsticks or rounds.

Garlic Herb Focaccia

2 cups warm water
2 cups white flour
1-2 Tbsp honey
2+ Tbsp dry yeast

Blend in a large bowl and allow to rest about 30 minutes.

1 & 1/2 cups cornmeal
2 cups wheat flour (I'm using fresh hard red wheat)
1 cup white flour
1/2 cup olive oil
1/4-1/3 cup dried herbs (thyme, oregano, basil, parsley, black pepper)
four cloves garlic, minced
1 Tbsp salt

Add ingredients--begin with olive oil and garlic for ease, end with salt to preserve the yeast--and stir until slightly firm. Turn out on floured counter and knead together. The olive oil takes time to absorb, so it ought to remain sticky. Return to the bowl, cover, and allow to rest for at least one hour.

Flour for dusting
Olive oil for greasing
about 1 tsp course salt (optional)

Turn out on floured counter and knead, gradually adding just enough flour to prevent it from sticking. (You can use whichever flour you'd prefer; white for sweeter, wheat for heartier, cornmeal for sweet and slightly textured.) Divide into pieces (three or four loaves, probably), knead further and flatten into white circles or rectangles. Lightly grease baking sheets or pans (I've used round cake pans pretty successfully before), place loaves on sheets, then flip to grease both sides, and allow to rest. After thirty to forty-five minutes, indent the dough slightly and sprinkle in some salt. Let it rest about ten more minutes before baking at 400 F until golden brown, which is something like 30 minutes. Enjoy!

Haiku - Prairie Fire

2011-03-03T11:46:00.000-08:00

Scents of airborne ash
on the prairie winds, usher
in resurgent life.

~~~

I wrote this during class last night. We sweep ourselves up in the conversation of, theory about, plans for, and history concerning environmentalism and justice. Rom really took it away near the end of class with a description of regenerative cycles activism and community-building. What I inevitably returned to was the image of prairie fire. Prairie fire has been a somewhat affectionate term for Midwest populism in the past, which has its own contemporary counterparts these days, and has a fantastic sense of regrowth and beauty. The prairie fire sweeps out the grasses, but they are firmly rooted and many have seeds that require the fire to germinate. In a way, this is also in response to Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine because the fire seems to function as an initial catastrophe, clearing the land for cultivation or development. What the fire actually does, though, is allow for the space needed by the nascent growth to rise up out of the recovered soil. The life is not new or immature, it is resurgent and comes out of the dirt because its acclimation to the biome, fortitude, and particular character.

Haiku - Sleep

2011-02-27T13:13:00.000-08:00

Angry words mingle
with amber light and snowfall
crashing through my dreams.

~~~

Nothing spectacular, just a night's sleep interrupted. I am unwell again, but it feels pretty glancing after last week's ordeal. We continue to be blessed with snow and my morning strolls to work are enchanting. If only I could maintain enough sleep to really savor it. Sam (one of my housemates) was sleeping on the couch this morning because his room gets too hot at night. I imagine that as I shuffle between my room and the bathroom, the kitchen and the dining table, that I am strolling through his dreams. I sit with headphones listening to New Yorker Fiction Podcast episodes while I eat breakfast, hoping that it makes the scene somewhat less unnerving when he wakes and sees me there. He inevitably wakes when I am preparing or enjoying breakfast, despite my attempt at soft footfalls and lifting the teapot before it whistles.

Friday night we hosted a housewarming party. Before the night was over I recalled a half dozen folks who I failed to invite. That said, it was a successful showing, with food and drink and words and laughter. The house was tidied for the evening and I appreciate that it has returned to a similar state. Strange: I have never hosted a "housewarming" party, but the term makes sense. Now all these friends and colleagues know where I live, have been made welcome to that space, and have enjoyed what hospitality I could provide. Also, drunkenness allows for my attention to be oddly fixated, on an overfilled wine glass for example, like a soft pressure on my mind. It is not sharp, but gradual and definite. All said and done, it was a delightful evening and I am appreciative of those who attended and apologetic toward those I failed to invite.

Place Journals, 5-6

2011-02-23T16:36:00.000-08:00

I forgot I hadn't yet posted these. I turned them in on Monday and look forward to reading the professor's response.

~~~

Entry 5, 11 February 2011

I
A compass rose points
north, but what directs us home?
Where do I find that?

II
Keen sunlight shining
on winter's slumbering crop
while the lizard bathes.

Today we went to Willow Bend Environmental Education Center. The building is simple, long, straw bail construction, and regionally xeriscaped. In the garden a large stone has been cut smooth and a bronze, strangely insect-like compass rose has been set atop it. The compass rose, one of the first things I noted when I circled the building before the tour, has a particular symbolic gravity to it. While Willow Bend is a straightforward and effective piece of architecture, and Thoreau's mission humming in the back of my mind, the compass seemed to point not just in the cardinal directions, but to ourselves and to our simplified future.

That said, how? I do not like posing rhetorical questions. They tend to feel trite and inconsiderate. I have difficulty escaping the tension of what I am studying, where I am, and where I see myself going. The compass embodies this sense of guided directionlessness. So much of the course for this Construction Management: Sustainability course has been cutting edge, high tech, and grand-scale designing. Our first tour guide, the site architect, informed us – somewhat condescendingly – that green building is not cheap. I don't want cheap, I want effective and affordable. If we want to live simply, live well, and live affordably, we have models of the last few thousand years to draw on. We are not doing anything new, our tour guide commented today, in building this way. In fact, I would chime, we are doing something exceedingly old.

In what direction does our compass point? Does it point forward to the time we are engaged in making? Does it point backward to the lessons we can glean from the past? Does it point outward to contain the abundant models and triumphs surrounding us? Our compass, I believe, points in all of these directions. The direction that it inevitably fails to point, likely the most important direction, is inward. Within we can perceive and understand, even sculpt and direct our expectations and values. If I want to live simply, live affordably, and live green, doesn't that mean removing the fat of life and enjoying the lean cut that is left?

In The Omnivore's Dilemma by Pollan, he remarks that “marbled” beef is the nice way of framing fatty, less protein-rich meat that comes from cows unable to exercise or move freely. Marbled is even faintly positive; it reminds us of marble pillars and sculpture, of elegance and class. Marbled certainly doesn't suggest the unhealthy repercussions of an industrial food system that become enmeshed in the flesh of animals and the food stuffs we purchase and eat. Perhaps we have become too enamored with the fatty parts of our lives and ought to expect leaner, more wholesome cuts.

This is all coming from a vegetarian, after reading Thoreau who brags about his vegetable-based diet, and even noticing the fantastic National Geographic info-graphic a professor had posted about water consumption for various food products. Our language is rich in the metaphor of meat and its apparent virtues, I can't turn a good one down if it is glaring, or rather glistening, right in front of me. What I hope to emphasize is the way our homes and our eats are not separate. I want to eat a particular way for ethical reasons, I want to dwell in a certain way for ethical reasons. I even want to date in one way and not another for ethical reasons.

Well, that may be misleading. My ethics is about becoming, about crafting myself into the type of person who lives in a sustainable, regenerative, and interwoven community. I try to fashion behaviors therefrom. If someone were to ask, “How does a good”– that is, recuperative, mutualistic, and interdependent –“person eat?” then someone else might point in my direction, or at least to my crowd. This act isn't intended to be laudable. What could I do with that praise anyway? Rather, it is an act of modeling, of positive participation in the world of others, both human and non-human.

When the question of sustainable living comes back to the home, to lifeways and housecare and quality of life, I am challenged more and more. How do I model that behavior? How do I cultivate it in myself? To whom can I look for guidance? In one way, I can look around, just as the compass directs me. Another way, though, is to see what is already before my eyes that otherwise might elude me.

This latter is one interpretation of the second haiku. Roles of dormancy and solar usage are just about universal in Nature. Besides my stint in Brazil, everywhere I have lived the landscape goes through periods of activity and periods of quiet. These periods relate to sunlight, water, temperature, the length of the night and so on. What time do we make for dormancy? What space to we make for rest? How do our buildings reflect or fail to reflect this need and this space?

Right now, my mattress is on the floor of my new bedroom. I think that this is making my sleep less substantial and satisfying. I have failed to cultivate proper space for dormancy. In addition, this is the result of inadequate finances despite a rather hefty workload, suggesting an overall over-expression of activity and an absence of dormancy. What would it mean to include space for quiet, reflection, meditation, and rest in a home or life or community?

We also have the swift but patient lizard. He reserves his energy for proper use, though is often still. Why do offices all over campus and all over the planet run computer terminals when no one is using them? Why are office lights left on all night? Why do we let rainwater run away from where it can be used for landscaping and allowed to infiltrate? What of the escape of heat through poor insulation or the chill rush of an improperly sealed home? Wherever we look we see the inability to act like a simple lizard who is all the time teaching us. We have so much yet to discover from what is in front of us, I hope we begin to look for it.

~~~

Entry 6, 13 February 2011

I
To become walker
in this space and measuring
distance by footfalls.

II
The sharp mid-day light
singes by faint degree with
marked affection.

III
Skin a-hum – neither
pulse nor tremor – intoning
subtle songs of flesh.

IV
Listen for blue-sky
songs, the music of daylight,
cloud, & whisper wind.

So, first order of business is that I did not journal yesterday. With that said, my first haiku is adapted from meditations this morning on my pre-dawn walk to work. Perhaps I am inspired by Thoreau's reflection on walking rather than working to pay for a coach or train ticket in order to travel, or I am taken by the walkability of Flagstaff, but for whatever reason I am newly determined to walk my way more often. Early last semester, my friend and classmate Katherine shared her love for walking around her new neighborhood in Sunnyside. She wrote a personal essay on the sense of knowing a place, through physical contact with that place. I am taken, more and more, to this notion of physical connection and materiality. Here I am. Here I touch the Earth. Here is where I walk. What power resides in that understanding.

Especially in the darkened morning hours, with the particular darkness – deeper, thicker, sounder – of the Dark City of Flagstaff, walking and reflecting has its own spiritual dimension. Recently, I read an article in a 2008 National Geographic on light pollution. Flagstaff has a tradition of dimming the lights and maintaining clear skies for astronomical observations, but the import of dark spaces is more profound than that. The article goes on to point out the physiological and psychological roles of darkness, of sound darkness in our well-being. Thoreau would have been unaware of this importance as he still lived in a time of almost solely natural light. Though he does deride the artificial flame when the solar light is still about. Should we so easily forget the natural dark?

Today has been a beautiful day. From the clear and crisp five a.m. Dark, to the clean and uncomplicated sunrise, and to the rich blue and whispy clouds and sunlit warmth of the late afternoon, I have been struck with the sincere delight of the day. Outside, reading Walden, sipping tea and munching bread, I saw the sky and awoke to myself and to the space around me. I wrote II-IV in quick succession, first feeling the uncommon pressure of the day on my neck, hair, and scalp; then sensing a strange vibration in my own skin and being struck by the celerity of its rhythm, the strange music lying therein; and then finally coming back to the sky and meditating on a music resonant with my own body. Merleau-Ponty writes that despite the different sensory organs, the act of sensing is unified and whole. I think I was attempting to bridge the distinctions of sense and appreciate the sensual moment of perception.

Also, as I continue the practice of haiku, I come up again and again to the boundaries of the anglicized rules of haiku. Haiku, in the Japanese, is not a matter of syllabic concision or limitation, but capturing a scene or moment – some microcosm of the whole – with as much brevity as possible. In a way, I think that haiku itself recognizes the unification of the senses that Merleau-Ponty identifies. When we attain understanding of haiku, either in the act of writing or reading, it is a full, sensual understanding of the scene, that moment, that pulls us out of ourselves and into the world. Effective haiku knits us to the world and provides a model for active engagement thereto.

To turn back, but also to take with us what has been said, a friend of mine and I long ago discussed night. She thought of night as exhibitionist, a place to display despite the absence of a clear audience; night supposes a clearer stage onto which we play as actors. In one sort of way, I understood and appreciated this sentiment. What I said, and we later agreed on if memory serves, is that night is thick and substantial compared to the lightness of daytime. When you walk in darkness, it is immediate to your senses, unseparated from you.

This is, in effect, a reflection on sight as well. Sight and sound are “distant” senses, they place the subject away from the object. That is because light and sound travel to our senses as energy, whereas smell, taste, and touch are immediate. These latter three come to us through contact with the stuff of the world. In the darkness, even sound becomes more immediate as it displaces sight as our primary perceptive faculty. Our bodies are more prone to responding to the audible messages we receive, making physical the sensual information we receive.

Thoreau at Walden Pond is, in a different way, knitting himself to space. He reflects on fishing in the dark after dining with friends, planning for dinner the next day, and the mercurial qualities of the darkened pond, the rich life he finds there, and the mystical, even divine reality of “earth's eye” watching him. Though I still find his writing rather long-winded and verbose, a quality he himself derides in others, I am touched more in the harmony his own reflections have with the conversations and behaviors with which my own friends are engaged. His rich poetry is delightful for its celebration of place, in the spiritual and even transcendent qualities of Walden Pond; occasionally even criticizing the inferiorities of other small New England bodies of water as he raises Walden Pond to the character of the Ganges and scoffs at the idea of carrying the water away to town via pipe.

With the Dark City Ordinance – recently raised due to Best Buy's daunting interior lighting – and the spiritual and political brier patch of The Peaks, not to forget the tradition of wilderness tourism, preservation, and recovery, Flagstaff seems primed for its own fleshy, sensual thickness. We are, strange as it may sound, closer to the stars here than in other cities. They represent a sort of “real estate” in this town that everyone else must pay homage. Thoreau brings in Greco-Roman deities to whom he gives sacrifice – he burns an old fence, built for Terminus and in ode to Vulcan – while Flagstaff brings in our own mountaintop entities. The Peaks suggest a rich rootedness to place, a soulful fullness despite the political and economical rhetoric; I would go so far as to say that the rhetoric for development substantiates the tension embodies in conflicted space. An argument therefrom is for another forum, though.

I suppose this is coming to a close, though I hope the regularity here has trained me to maintain my own blog with greater rigor. With a certain consideration, I hope that I have touched on place with enough detail to fulfill the expectations of the assignment. That said, my thoughts are often bound to place in veiled or esoteric ways; that is not to suggest that they are any less present and immanent. Rather. I think of the experience and conceptualization of place as more and more the crèche from which my esoteric understanding flows. I think differently here than I have in Lincoln, Nebraska or St. Peter, Minnesota. In Rivers and Tides, Andy Goldsworthy speaks eloquently of his need to acquaint himself to the new places before he begins his commissions, that the work of travel is disheartening and dislocating. I can understand this, though I am less skilled at the work of place-acquaintance than he. The realities to which I am awakening are not different from the things I have otherwise considered and written on, rather, they are like seeds that grow differently in different climes. Give a seed water, soil, and light and it will do what it does best: Grow. Just how it does so, though is up to its own conversation with the magic of that place.

Haiku - Snow

2011-02-23T16:32:00.000-08:00

White blankets fall, to
blur the coloring book lines,
and obscure edges.

~~~

Snowstorm this previous weekend. It fell as I was recovering from an illness. Food documentaries and snow block edibles... A fine way to return to the land of the living.

I had difficulty here capturing the sense of lost distinctions that snow gives me. I am in love with the way the world is remade with fresh snow. It is clear and blinding, sublime and unknowable, uniform and edible. I think we know better how the world is - infinite, unseen, uninterrupted - and how we do not know it - covered, untouchable, numbing, present. Snow is soft and painful, childlike and keen.

Haiku - Stones

2011-02-17T18:43:00.000-08:00

Weighing stones, my own
& others, unable to
discern them today.

~~~

I am not especially well today, or yesterday, or the day before. I hope that tomorrow brings wellness. Today, though, I have had difficulty appreciating where my own frustrations end and others begin. I am carrying too many stones, stones I think are mine but are not. I seem to be, even if it is just internally, foisting my own stones on others. Perhaps wellness will bring me to myself again, and allow me to see others for themselves, as well.

Place Journals, 2-4

2011-02-10T18:18:00.000-08:00

Entry 2, 8 February 2011

Flour, yeast, skin heat;
patient things, living & not,
that touch, bind, & grow.

One key place for me, both physically and mentally, is at the Village Baker. I suppose the mental aspect includes the place I go when I handle ingredient, dough, and bread that includes handling it in my own kitchen. Though cooking holds its own grace, creativity, and spirit, baking is a collaborative act. It is collaboration between oneself and yeast, the flour with the humidity or aridity, the heat of the oven with the sugars in the dough that brown as they bake. Food – growing ingredients, handling them, creating food, sharing and dining – holds so much spirit for me, so much of the reality of community and the manifestations of place.

Douglas Adams tells a joke in one of the Hitch-hiker's Guide “trilogy” novels. He describes in some detail the notion of gravity and the mechanics of the universe and that, with the proper calculations and scientific instruments, one could describe all the bodies in the universe with a single slice of fairy cake appropriately monitored. One of his characters is subsequently strapped into a machine to understand the universe, based off of a piece of fairy cake, and the oddball Zaphod learns, not to any great surprise, that the universe exists for him. He releases himself from the jaw-dropping immensity of the universe that machine portrays, greets his shocked and scientifically-minded captor, and eats the fairy cake, explaining that the universe exists just for him.

I fail at articulating Adams's particular wit and good humor, but I love the notion of a piece of cake explaining everything in the universe. Especially because, on certain days and with certain other conditions, that piece of cake is the perfect explanation of the universe. It is only when our understanding of food is immensely impoverished do we think of it as simple. The experiences we have with food are historical, memory-filled, place-based, illustrative, and moving. Smells return us to our mothers' kitchens; tastes plunge us into private worlds of mystery and discovery; and only special intimacy rivals the tactile detail and intensity with which we confront food.

Participating in the craft of food, especially the interpretive labor of baking, is so important to me because it connects us in all these ways and more. The process and the product of baking are ever-changing, organic, surprising, and satisfying. To meditate on the endeavor, one wonders exactly where the baker ends and the baked good begins; or, for that matter, the roles of the yeast and heat of the oven in their functions in producing each particular loaf. Speaking as one with great experience in baking, the dough speaks and acts differently, engaging you with its own moods and behaviors on each day. Learning to interpret and entertain dough challenges our ideas of sentience and insentience, labor and participation.

But who is patient in this communion? I don't know exactly. “Patient things, living & not” is intended to portray this delicious confusion. First, by valuing and appreciating the virtue of things, we begin to breakdown the dichotomies between subject and object, actor and the acted upon. What can we learn from the objects around us? Do they manifest virtue? Do they describe lessons? How is it that we can benefit from them unless we share something, well, spiritual?

This interrogation extends with the third line, “that touch, bind, & grow.” The bonds between the dough, this dynamic and collaborative food, and the surroundings – the bakery, oven, table, pan, ourselves – are sticky in more ways than one. Sometimes we like to “sanitize” cooking through instruments, tools, and appliances; we make the food appear clean despite its messy history. The manual to my electric mixer has a spotless red appliance, whisk-like blade attached, and a bowl full of what is likely brown frosting without a hint crawling up the edge or sitting on the lip; but everything about the image suggests a lack of mess, polish, and serenity. Cooking is not serene! Nor ought it be. Cooking is about combinations, amalgamations, transformations; biology, chemistry, and spirit!

What is growing, I wonder, and what arises therefrom? What exactly is bound together? I know with my fingers and eyes and nose what is touching, but the magic of it is in the unknown. Gluten forms in the molecules of the flour, but require the water; the yeast feeds on sugars and produces carbon dioxide bubbles, but they have also been awakened from dormancy. Being raised Catholic, I was challenged and eventually discarded the notion of transubstantiation. Now, though, I identify as a witness of the miracle. The only problem is I see it everywhere.

~~~

Entry 3, 9 February 2011

I
My circulation
and inhalation weave flesh
into keen cold air.

On my bike, especially in the cold chill of pre-dawn morning, I breathe deeply of the thin, sharp air. It cuts and soothes and bites and warms. My muscles heat up under their layers, even my hands in their cozy, wind-breaking gloves, and I can push the heat to where I want it to go. Sometimes, at least. My eyes tear up as they become irritated by the aridity, my throat tingles with the hint of a cough, and my lungs and diaphragm quake when the occasional hack arises. My body is, in all of these responses and interpretations, in conversation with the environment; even down to my blood.

“Weave flesh / into keen cold air” bares the weight of this thought. I am stuck in this idea of coming to know a place, both body and spirit. If anything, our bodies are the first to engage with the project. A subject raised in class – during the guided imagining exercise, I believe – was the replacement of atoms and cells in our bodies over rather brief periods of time. I also think of Pollan's reinterpretation of “corn people” in The Omnivore's Dilemma; our bodies reflect the molecules and the construction of the food we consume, and we ought to take this to heart if we want to be part of a more sustainable, rooted culture. Most of us are mostly constructed from corn carbon, composed of carbon molecules taken in from the abundant corn-based products we consume.

I want to consider a different way in which we are our inputs. In our air is nitrogen, oxygen, carbon dioxide, water molecules, and various other compounds in small percentages. When we inhale, we take all of this in and the otherworldly, inverted forest of our lungs and their alveoli transform that gas into little baskets, carried by our red blood cells, all over our body. The membrane and mechanisms are semi-porous, selecting only what it recognizes or the molecules that confound the system; that is, most of the bad stuff stays out, but some of it gets in. When all goes well, our circulation reflects that positivity. If the air is appropriately dense or our lungs are efficiently adapted, then the thrum of the blood in our bodies is calm and persistent. When the situation changes, everything happens faster and less certainly. Lactic acid and carbon dioxide builds up in our blood vessels and tissues, dust and pollen and mucus accumulate in our lungs and esophagus, and our blood is less capable of moving the life-giving oxygen throughout our body.

The whole process is an act of replacement, consumption, and recovery. These are not deleterious in the same way as they sometimes are in common parlance. Rather, we are taking part in the reciprocal relationship that an ecosystem characterizes. My carbon dioxide with sunlight feeds plants and algae, just as their oxygen and sugars – also, conveniently, from them – metabolize into carbon dioxide for them. Waste equals food; or, in other terms, there is no waste, it is all food.

II
Clouds casting shadows
veil the fat, descending flakes
that sublime in light.

It snowed yesterday morning and is all gone again by now. I may have slipped on some of its icy remnants, but I think that is from the more determined precipitation of weeks before. The temperament of Flagstaff bewilders me. It fluctuates wildly. The amicable snow of yesterday morning all happened before light had crashed in on the Safeway parking lot. (It is our parking lot, too, as well as a number of other shops and services; but I think everyone identifies it with Safeway.) The snow-laden clouds themselves obscured the dawn and obfuscated the light later in the day. I realized that it had all come and gone while many Flagstaffians slept, entirely unaware.

In the bakery, I think we all felt that the day would have been a good one to stay warm and cozy in our beds. The change in the air had surprised me. It was not warm, hovering around twenty degrees I think, but a density or taste that has often eluded me here. Only later when I heard talk of snow did I realize it was moisture. So quickly after moving here from the Midwest, where air is perpetually thick with humidity and its precipitate threats, I have lost the sensitivity or maybe the awareness to such tastes and accents suspended in the air.

Or perhaps I am learning the new dialect of this place, catching the suggestions of colloquialisms and turns of phrase that specific places develop. Flagstaff, and its residents, have their own spins of language that I am learning. The language of its residents, with their tendency toward transience, is often in between or hodgepodge, touched with tempered references from all of our different origins. The language of the place, though, is especially loaded and exciting. Air changes abruptly from day to day, a morning of cloud is gone by night while the daytime sun wards off all but the most determined. I dress for both the chilliest morning and the encouraging warmth of midday when I leave work. Sometimes – more last semester than this – I would leave for work and not return again until the sun had set; a whole day spent in and between the places I work, study, converse, dine, reflect, and ride.

That is a strange thing to consider, especially with the previous haiku in mind: the places I ride. Often, we do not consider our in-between locales. Roads, sidewalks, pathways, trails, neighborhoods, lanes, corridors, and so on, those get us to where we are going. The brief splash of snow, its remnant ice, and the repercussions of each are more hindrances for the places I ride, the places many drive or walk. These are the most prone to elemental, meteorological transformations.

I use “sublime” here for its abundant meanings. In art, the sublime transcends the world, reveals divinity and our inability to understand it. The sublime awes us. In chemistry, sublimation is the transformation from solid to gas; what was solid becomes, almost miraculously, insubstantial and unbound. In each case, the sublime is about one reality juxtaposed, without clear explanation, on another. The morning became a different morning. It happened twice, even. All the while, it evaded most of us. What are we to make of that?

~~~

Entry 4, 10 February 2011

I
Winter's sun kisses
unkempt transient gardens
fertile with green dreams.

II
Glass, leaf, ceramic;
co-mingled, interwoven;
what bulb might burst forth?

Just a few weeks ago I moved into a new place. It is a house, just south of the tracks, that used to be a Mexican wedding chapel and, before that, was a workers' union building. The structure is very much its own, the landlord even more so, and it is refreshing to get out of the apartment that never quite fit.

Tim and I are captivated by having a yard. It is one big mess at the moment, full of dry and disregarded stems of grass that have bent over under now vanished snow, dropping from a few different household dogs, and the debris of parties and unthinking previous residents. I spent some of this afternoon, between reading sessions, picking up cans, shards of glass, odd bits of broken dishes, and every so often finding something interesting. I am tempted to see if Tim would drink the mysterious, unopened can of Tecate still suspended by its plastic six-pack rings.

We want to clean it up, trim the overgrowth, tidy the leavings, spread our compost, maybe dig up space for a rain garden, definitely cultivate an herb garden, and Tim has the bright idea of tiling an extended patio off of the cement pathway. Even just as month-by-month renters, we think of this place as potentially our own, not just ours.

Today Sam, who has lived here for a few months, asked how long I planned on staying; he was happy and perhaps a little relieved to hear that I wanted to stick around for a good while. The house is marked, mostly by the accumulation of odd appliances and décor, as an attractor of transience. That isn't to say transient people, but the feel of shifting, ebbing, uncertain movements. Human-oriented green spaces do not generally appreciate such shiftiness and the yard reflects that. That said, such a wide open space is a rare discovery in Flagstaff with its higher price of living and houses sitting on cozy lots. It would please me to see a more lived in locale, a cared for yard or garden.

Almost since moving to Flagstaff I have been engaged in composting. In the apartment I constructed a box from the remains of a desk I found behind Absolute Bikes. With a little chicken-wire fence and some large terra cotta pots found along the road, I became able to turn the compost between sections. The product has been rich and alchemical. My mother has laughed a good natured laugh whenever I tell her of these industrious undertakings, but I was giddy to pull out a handful of soil, still pockmarked with brown egg shells and the hearts of leafy greens one day. Now we have a place to put it, even if the cold is trying to complicate my experimentation.

If anything, the compost and the arrival here feels like a lesson in patience. A sharp eye and wise use of what little spare time I have has allowed me to make something out of what would have been nothing. Well, not nothing, but just waste to end up in a landfill or something. Instead, through the organic alchemy of warmth, life, and food I have yielded a sort of gold all my own.

Besides patience, the compost has taught me compassion. My brother and his wife tend a compost heap in Louisiana where it stays about seventy degrees just about whenever. At the reception for their wedding, we all chatted and fanned ourselves while we sat doing as little as possible and sweat. I imagine that their compost teaches them generosity, magnanimity with its ease at digestion all they pile on. Out here in the chilly heights, one has to dig and feel and smell, rinse and turn and feed; I sense an Other in there, listening and speaking in calm whispers what it appreciates, what it needs, and what it has to give to me.

I read outside most of the day. It was cool, but the sun shines beautifully on the yard. The light is rich and delicious, an appropriate compliment to Barbara Kingsolver and Gary Snyder. (Thoreau had to wait a while.) The sun was rich and delicious, lazing all through the afternoon. The wind rustling with a sharp chill. Today has been my day off.

Place Journal, Day I

2011-02-07T19:23:00.000-08:00

This is part of a week-long assignment about reflecting on place. I plan on continue with the haiku motif, but with further exploration in prose. Since it is very much akin to what I try to maintain on here, except for recipes, I figured I would post them here as well.

Also, making vegan chocolate chocolate chip cookies tomorrow. Planning on having friends over to eat them. Will post the recipe once it gets worked out, though it will likely be heavily influenced by an Epicurious recipe that I'll link to.

~~~

Entry 1, 7 February 2011

Branch & trunk, the crash
of light & time; growing days
meet & carry me.

Spring arrives weirdly in Flagstaff. At least my first one is doing that. It is early February and it feels like Spring. The light here has a crisp intensity, not unlike the Minnesota chill light, but touched and touching with its own clime. The days are lengthening, though I notice their earlier starts more than their later hours, but the roles of my life are catching up to me.

Something Janine (Dr. Schipper? In my discussion notes in class, at least while I'm taking them, I write her down as Janine just as I would a student. I was trained years ago to assuage titles and formalities when it comes to colleagues.) said during our class exercise struck me: “Do not rush to the responsibilities of your day.” I mentioned afterward that I do not want to collide with my day, I do not want violent interaction with it. I wrote:

do not rush to meet the world
allow the world to rush to you
meet like lovers, old friends
& be together there

Joanna Macy wrote The World as Self, The World as Lover, a text read last semester that I did not especially enjoy, but one that touch on the ecstatic relationship one might have with the world. I dusted off Rumi the other day, looking for poetry to read at Lauren's (my best friend) wedding; an ecstatic Sufi poet, engaged with the world in intimate reflection, discovery, and delight. These words echo, I hope authentically, the sentiments of Rumi or of Sufism generally.

As the responsibilities pile up – baking work, classwork, study time, assistantship work, friends, self – I hope that I can resolve the tension of rushing into the day. That is what I refer to with “the crash of light & time;” or at least, the light of wintry Spring and the time of early Spring semester. Rather than combating time, what about coincidence and cooperation? By coincidence, I suppose I mean the process of inciting together, deriving insight together, instantiating the moment together. We do not make our moments on our own, we produce them collectively, crafting scene and sense and memory and the rich web of perception with the world, with our companions, and with our memories and imaginations.

In A Door Into Ocean by Joan Slonczewski, the indigenous sisterhood of Shora use language in descriptive, philosophical ways. A recurring theme is the action-reaction relationship: One cannot strike without being struck, when one swims one is also being swum, and when one connects one is also the object of another's connection. Writing that the “growing days meet & carry me,” I refer to this sort of relationship. First, the project of the day is a collective, social act between the participants of the day; we act in unison – though not always in cooperation – to create the heterogeneous, vibrant, and confounding reality of the moment. I also want to connect with another, more personal reality that I have often meditated on: When we breathe, we are also being breathed by the pressure in the air which fills our lungs. Janine's exercise touches on this relationship with food – specifically breakfast – but the cooperative action of breathing is relaxing and comforting. Imagine a hand, softly pressed on your chest, as if it were performing a mild CPR on your relaxed body. And finally, I think of the ways in which we greet, converse with, and either connect to or divorce ourselves from the day. In this conception, the day is itself an entity, defined as it is by certain cosmic cycles, but ultimately coming back around, beginning again, somewhat different but somewhat the same as well.

In this place – Flagstaff, Arizona; February of 2011; the SSLUG garden and now the new house on Agassiz St; here, wherever I am – I am uncertain of the relationships I have built and the ones I am engaged in building. What I have is an increasingly familiar, warm, comforting space: the circle of tree trunks around terra cotta tiles, amidst pine trees and the slumbering stumps of broccoli and other garden produce, a bed of pine needles, and the softly descending sun. My mornings are long, but I may begin to lengthen them further for meditation, writing, reflection. Are not one's values in one's action? Perhaps that is the Catholic still speaking in me, or perhaps it is the virtue ethics with which I feel bound. Most likely, it matters less than the conviction to acquaint myself to the here and now and the difficulties I have with doing that.

Touching Peace

2011-02-04T20:56:00.001-08:00

Touching peace amidst
confusion, caught with strange ghosts
and my memories

Orange Date Cookies (Vegan)

2011-02-03T12:20:00.000-08:00

I posted pictures of these on the tumblr. Here is the recipe:

2 cups white flour
1 c whole wheat pastry flour
1 c oats
1/2 Tbsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
Mix in a bowl and set aside.

1 c honey
1/2 c sunflower oil (or substitute with canola)
1/2 c milled flax seed
1/2 c warm water (or juice from zested oranges, see below)
Blend in an electric mixer thoroughly, medium to high for about 4 minutes. The flax should make the mixture slightly bubbly.

1 & 1/2 c dates, pitted and chopped
zest of two oranges
juice of the oranges (in place of warm water)
Add to the liquid ingredients and mix. Gradually add in the dry ingredients while mixing until all incorporated. Wipe down the bowl with a spatula as needed. The dough is sticky.

A few tablespoons of flour on a plate or in a bowl.
Heat oven to 375 F. Pinch out dough with floured hands, roll round, flatten slightly (about half dollar coin sized) and place on greased sheet. Bake for 10-13 minutes until golden brown. These like to burn on the bottom, so insulate pan with a second sheet pan below or use higher quality pans than what I currently have. Allow to cool and place on a cooling rack. Makes about three dozen cookies.

Mornings

2011-01-31T03:13:00.000-08:00

Dark rooms and blue flames;
catching pre-morning shadows
and some strange blessings.

House

2011-01-28T13:24:00.000-08:00

Full rooms made empty,
a vacant room filled up,
and new morning dark.

Bike Haiku 2, and Reflection

2011-01-25T16:27:00.000-08:00

Rupture, tear, puncture;
hiccups, snap, and broken chains:
Learn patient lessons.

Revised (26 Jan 2011):
Puncture, tear, split chain;
learning these patient lessons:
Patch, splice, replace, mend.

~

I think of Brazil and the "bad spirit" I had on my shoulder at every turn. Things are not so bad and, at least, I do not have to argue for the pertinence of transdisciplinary study. Learning maintenance for my bike has also demanded a practice of patience, attention, and responsivity. It has its costs, but I still want to smile at the motorists who think themselves wiser. I wonder: Do they think I'm poor? Without a car? Silly or crazy? Perhaps someday we'll be "mad as motorists" rather than "mad as hatters;" of course, I think most consider me a mad biker these days.

Yesterday, a nice young woman stopped her car at a Lake Mary Road intersection. Late Mary is often a fast-paced road and causes me a some consternation. She slowed and I glanced toward the car. She gave me a smile and a thumbs up. The gesture, small and corteous but apparently enthusiastic, has stuck with me. Especially on that road motorists feel entitled to drive however they wish; that, I suppose, is true which ever road you're on. Cyclists have a lane on Lake Mary, but few need to stay on it for long and many bike on the left shoulder to get into the awkwardly situated neighborhood in which I live. Though not inappropriate, I object because it is narrow in parts and it can confuse other cyclists, pedestrians, and motorists. I think that this young woman was sharing the road well, not just spatially, but mentally as well; a behavior for which I am thankful.

Biking, I am always learning lessons. On one's bike, one is open to the world, uninsulated. Even in the morning when I am all bundled up, I have to pay keen attention to early morning walkers and joggers, the occasional homeless person, the unlit cyclist, the overconfident or groggy driver. Riding in the cold, especially where the temperature changes so drastically, means consideration of only what I need to wear but also what I will need to wear in the early afternoon, the warmest part of the day. I think of work and study and leisure. Though I do not discourage my totemic raven, I often call myself a turtle - thinking fondly of a story of two friends, then in love, speaking in Spanish ("tortuga") to a young boy in the New York City Subway - as I unfurl all my apparent belongings, rearrange, repack, unload, deliver, and utilize them. A turtle on wheels, a raven hovering overhead, a loaf of bread and book near-at-hand.

Maple-Pumpkin Muffin Cookies

2011-01-25T16:11:00.000-08:00

This is much delayed. I made these for my birthday dinner a month and a half ago. Either way, here is a pretty tasty - a nice balance of savory and sweet - recipe. They may have turned out muffin-y because of the high altitude; adjust leavening as needed.

Maple-Pumpkin Muffin Cookies
2 cups creamed, baked pumpkin (can use canned or alternative squash)
1 tsp nutmeg
1 Tbsp cinnamon
1 tsp dry, ground ginger
Mix together in an electric mixer. If given to you by your mother, they'll turn out even better.

1 c butter, cut into small cubes
1 c maple syrup (or honey, if maple syrup is out of the question, can augment with extract)
1 egg
1/2 c honey
1 tsp vanilla or almond extract
Add to mixture and blend until smooth.

2 c white flour
1 c whole wheat pastry flour
1 tsp salt (omit or half if butter is salted)
1 c thick oats
2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tbsp baking powder
In a separate bowl, mix dry ingredients and then gradually blend into pumpkin mixture.

1 c chopped pecans (optional)
1 c diced apple or pear (optional)
These ingredients may be altered or omitted if prefered.
Stir in by hand. Spoon onto lightly greased baking sheet. These bake nicely as larger cookies or as very small cookies depending on batch needed; makes about two to four dozen depending on size. Bake at 375 F for 13-15 minutes, until lightly browned. Note: Honey and syrup like to burn, so use an insulated pan or bake on one rack with an insulating tray immediately below to prevent blackened bottoms.

The leftover dough froze wonderfully and provided a great morning sweet when I got around to baking some of the leftovers. One can also make a sweeter cookie by adding a 1/4 cup of sugar or slightly more honey.

~~~

Also, I have been baking biscuits in the morning. Yes, mornings before I go to the bakery. I am working out a roughshod recipe, but have not had buttermilk around because I am actively moving. Once settled again, expect to hear about a buttermilk-cornmeal biscuit recipe sooner or later (within two weeks). I have access to fantastic blue cornmeal from the CSA store and can often find buttermilk on discount. I also want to start culturing kefir and yogurt once I've moved, especially with the fantastic kefir starter gift from my brother and sister(-in-law). Expect posts of such exploits as well.

Haiku on Class

2011-01-19T20:06:00.000-08:00

Can we heal the world
with baked goods and hugs, instead?
It is worth a shot.

Circles

2011-01-17T14:55:00.000-08:00

Sunlight, bike wheels, boules;
imperfect zen circles that
guide beauty today.

2011-01-15T18:04:00.000-08:00

Big voice, forgiveness;
Impossibilities sound
clear & warm tonight.

Nicolai: My Nishiki

2011-01-15T11:16:00.000-08:00

[I plan on posting pictures taken with my phone at a soon but later time.]

A few months back I bought a used bike off of craigslist for, what I supposed, was a pretty barebones price. It is an extra large, (likely) early 1980's, blue Nishiki. I planned on learning something about bikes in the process of cleaning it up, customizing it, and fixing it. Following the immediate needs of a new tube and tire, and new chain, I took the opportunity to augment it with new toe-clip pedals, new handle bars and tape, lights (a must, really), a back-rack, and a much needed cassette cleaning. Most of this work was made possible with Mr. Tim Haynes's assistance, but I did most of it myself. The new chain did break once and, since I was away from home, was mended at Single Track bikeshop, and many of the pieces were purchased from Bike Revolutions and Absolute Bikes - the rack, an outlier, was purchased from Bike Hub.

In November, I believe, the stem of the bike (what attaches the handlebars to the headset and frame) began to wobble in a persistent and obvious way. I suspected some looseness in the headset, something requiring the tightening of a wrench and some grease, but it worsened and not until mid-December did I tend to it. The day I purchased a wide-mouthed wrench, thanks to birthday funds from my father, I refused to bike up the hill to deliver a finals paper in fear of catastrophic damage given the state of the stem. That evening, upon loosening the headset and pulling out the stem - an entirely novel experience for me - I discovered that the base of the stem had broken off. Had I attempted to bike up the hill, the journey may very well have released the stem entirely from the headset and sent me reeling. The bike was unusable until I could replace the stem. Unfortunately, doing so required the removal of the handle bars and tape I was so proud of installing on my own in the first place.

Before leaving for the holidays, I bought a new stem and cleaned out the headset pieces. Unfortunately, by this time, Tim had left for Lawrence and had taken his tools and grease with him. It wasn't until returning to Flagstaff a few weeks ago was I able to install the stem, reassemble the headset, rewrap the tape, and make the Nishiki serviceable again. I obtained new tools and bike grease to do so unsupervised. Though I was forced to undo steps two or three times to get the installation correct, I managed to do so on my own. (Assisted, again, by the ingenius multi-tool my father had gotten me for Christmas.) The next day I hesitantly rode the bike around town and, sensing no rambles or uncertainties in the reassembly, felt satisfied with my work. Tim even commented on the apparent soundness of the bike shortly after his return.

This endeavor had been a frustrating, insightful, and somewhat costly affair; all to a degree greater than I had expected. The process has also endeared me to the bike more than I feel I have ever been connected thereto. I feel that the bike has also become itself, recovered from misuse and disuse, by my hand and mentorship both digital and interpersonal. The Nishiki is also the most ideal fit to me of a bike I have owned. Though I still ride the Cannondale, occasionally referred to as Silver, and the Raleigh that stay in Lincoln, I can sense the imperfections of my frame as I ride them. With Nicolai, the name I feel the bike has given itself, I struggle with it, not because of it. Its gears still click from time to time and its friction shifters require tightening now and then to prevent unwanted gear change, but these are characteristics of the bike itself, quirks that one abides to maintain a relationship.

Back in December, before the damage revealed itself in full, from outside Mia's my compatriots and I discussed bicycles and bike theft with a passer-by. He commented that theft of an identifiable bike, one that is distinctly someone's bike, is foolhardy because, once a bike is clearly yours and not someone else's, you can identify it anywhere. I asked, then, how he felt about the Nishiki; to which he responded that it was an obvious bike, a clear and identifiable one. I took the comment to heart, especially after doing more work on it. A comment like that toward my bike, after so much work has been applied to it, reflects on me as well; just as a compliment to a close friend is complimentary to you as well. I am proud of recuperating and riding Nicolai, and I hope that Nicolai has similar, corollary sentiments.

From Yesterday

2011-01-14T14:26:00.000-08:00

My nails, overgrown
for a baker, become new
tidy, coy, clean tools.

Tea, scone, haiku

2011-01-12T15:58:00.000-08:00

Pinpricks and kind words,
infusions and diffusions,
flavor dusk's coming.

...

Trying to write something empirical, direct, and clear today. The sun has fallen behind a small building and the night's oncoming chill takes its place. Tea and friends and taste hang still in my mouth, my mind, my spirit. I am happy, but the cold and evening are taking my persistence from me.

Haiku & Reflection

2011-01-09T13:18:00.000-08:00

Dream architectures --
lighted, rhythmic, suspended --
melt in winter's heat.

...

Coming from a few inspirations, I am going to try to regularly write reflective haiku and post them on the tumblr. If I have the time, which is unlikely, and the ability, which is questionable I hope to provide short reflections on the subject of the haiku. To some of you, this may sound like something out of The Elegance of the Hedgehog, which it is, though I only realized that after considering it this morning during sunrise. Paloma Josse has a related project having to do with moments of beauty in the world, especially if they have to do with people. Miss Lauren has also pledged herself to poetic responsibilities on the blog which she stewards, Space to Simplify, a project I endorse.

It has been a long time since I have written much in the way of poetry, and rarely with any particular focus. This initiative is in response to my own shortcoming in maintaining this blog or the tumblr especially well. The haiku format, though demanding, is brief in quantity but demanding of attention, concision, and insight. Therefore, I can allow myself a great deal of consideration but can manage to write the outcome from my phone or write it by hand and transcribe it later. In addition, I hope it brings clearer moments of beauty, awakening, and reportage to the Philosophy that Bakes Bread. Finally, my previous experience with haiku resulted in some, shall we say, problems and this, therefore, demands of me a certain reconsideration of the format and how I might use it. These are muscles underused and I hope that whatever can be crafted with them is at least pleasant to read.

...

Now, to the reflection: I have just finished my lunch, following a change after work this morning at the bakery, and am enjoying the crisp air and midday warmth. My awning is decked with long, skeletal icicle dangling from a slowly shifting curtain of snow that has been melting and refreezing for the last three weeks or so. Icicles are connected by the rims of now vanished curtains, and the icicles themselves suggest cavernous depths or inverted towers. Drops fall perpetually in a musical way that oddly reminds me of a BBC story from early this morning about a Norwegian crafter and performer of musical instruments made of ice. I am underdressed for the chill, especially as it is on the northwest side of the building and is in shade, but love the now fading delicious contrast of food-warmth in my belly with the lasting body heat of bakery work, with the wintertime ice show and cool air. Oddly, though, the icicles suggest light by their very structure the way they carry images in themselves, and the thinness of their bodies. I am also thinking more and more of the work I hope to do on my detective story with Lorenzo Vincenzi and the role of dreams therein, not to mention the difficult or altogether absent sleep of my own nights these days. Following the reading material of this past semester, and having quickly read Ursula K le Guin's The Word for World is Forest, I perceive dreams to be increasingly substantial, foundational, constructive; they are not ethereal or passing, but potent manifestations that carry with them some sense of the world that requires our attention, or some focus by which our attention can be guided. These ideas, though, clash or contrast at least with the melting, the dissipation of those icicle, their metaphors, and whatever it is we can glean from them. The respond demands immediacy, interpretation, and remembrance in no simple way.

Becoming

2010-12-18T12:53:00.000-08:00

Having completed this semester, out at the Campus Coffee Bean savoring the damp chill and the faint sweetness of my Darjeeling tea, I have the strangest sense that I am becoming someone. This person is not a stranger, but someone pike a first cousin or half-forgotten childhood friend. I wonder if this is a person I see in the mirror in the morning, my eyes still heavy with the sleepdew of dreams. Ravens swoop and circle and I recall the daemons of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials series, the external manifestation of conscious or spirit, and how I was reflected on the notion; a raven seems fitting now more than ever. I am both unhinged and increasingly placed here. I have never been so busy as I have been over the past few months, and having weathered them well, I savor the potential to do it again. Insight and experience, I imagine, guiding me more and more in this direction - Flagstaff, sustainabilities, cultivating spirit, constructing place, fostering myself in applied academia, through applied ethics. The raven is a totem heavy with symbols, of transformation, intellect, life and death, persistence and change, adaptability and learning. This is both aspiration and action. The raven practices patience, reflection, creativity; but also wanders, explores, meanders. I am happy here, in a heady and rich way, feeling somewhat drunken with the spirits of this place, time, and labor.

Finally, in more ways than one.

2010-12-17T16:18:00.001-08:00

Thus ends the semester and my life comes back to me. A few friends have asked after me this past week, especially with a certain anniversary placed last Friday, and I finally feel capable of answering. After making veggie lasagna with homemade everything, listening to wonderful music, and savoring certain fine company, I slept in until nine in the morning. Nine in the morning: The latest I have slept since starting at the bakery. Even the nights I was up until four or so, I woke up around eight. Surely, I am living a new life as of this morning with the ability to sleep in so luxuriously.

Papers were handed in by email Thursday morning or by hand (my roommate Tim's, to be exact) on Sunday. Their subjects plagued my mind through the previous month and given an appropriate reprieve, I look forward to reading them over and savoring that work. For the moment, though, I am occupied by comic books, housecare, cooking, video games, and attending to those pleasures like Philosophy that Bakes Bread. Last night's quiet evening was spent lounging and listening to Bill Callahan, Bon Iver, some Bill Withers (the album gets a little too synthy halfway through), Neko Case, The Kinks (new purchase from the freshly reopened Bookman's where I also bought comics), and the reassuringly rich selections on Alela Diane radio on Last.fm. I doubt very much I could have had a similar evening any time since classes began with the slight exception of Thanksgiving weekend in Lincoln. (Sidenote, I slept in until nine in Lincoln, but my bodyclock was on Rocky Mountain time, so it doesn't really count.)

I think about food all the time again. Pre-dawn breakfast on Thursday was hashbrowns with onions and chard; last weekend's dinner party was bruschetta on baguettes for hors d'oeuvre and vegetarian paella that was immensely well-received, followed by maple-pumpkin muffin-cookies (accidentally muffin-y) for dessert as well as tasty additions from Miss Nina Porter and her company; I broiled and sautéed veggies and sweet potatoes the other day for a mid-afternoon lunch with happy results; a study-time dinner took leftover bruschetta and dressed a toasted sandwich with spinach, radish, and Asiago cheese on a baguette (also leftover from the dinner party); and have even begun adding sliced apples and pears to just about any piece of bread with peanut butter on it. My brother's gift of a kefir starter is well-received and I look forward to culturing some when I return from Lincoln; hopefully I can lift some recently expired milk from the bakery for the task.

Over Thanksgiving I decided I wasn't going to purchase more alcohol over Advent (the Catholic season that precedes Christmas), which has failed absurdly. Besides last weekend, which called for especially enthusiastic celebrations, I have not overindulged; that said, paper-writing, reading and rereading notes, constructive reflections, and the overall rigor of finals has been made that much easier by a beer or glass of wine - more often a beer - by my side. Perhaps it was an intoxicating endeavor to provide myself some calm in the absence of the real thing, or I may have also been taking Professor Doug Huff's advice to heart, or I may even have been hankering for the delightful evenings of senior year spent in fine company over books and computers with drink near at hand. It isn't something I feel guilty about, especially with the other fasts I have imposed on myself for the season, but a little surprising given how successful my prohibition on snacking and sweets has been.

Sleeping regularly and unperturbed by bothersome dreams - not nightmares in the sense I am used to, but stressful or heckling in their own way - even just one night has its own recuperative qualities. The experience seems to reflect forward, a notion I considered in papers and now think of more, into what will be for a while. A classmate once described how she preferred having the winter holiday between classes and finals, but now the notion seems especially absurd. My classwork, studies, and reflection are valuable to me, producing critical work that always feels unfinished in the best of ways; but having them over makes even my eyelids feel a little lighter. Or, I might add, feeling satisfyingly heavy when I have the time to sleep as was the case last night after reading Doom Patrol comics (Rachel Pollack's run that immediately follows Morrison's). I sense a richness in the scents of the world: a clean house, a bustling coffeeshop, cooking food, hot tea, chocolate undertones in ales and stouts, the sweetness of softly biting red wines, and more intimate aromas of hair and skin and active bodies; I feel them prickling over the surface of my skin.

Strange and a tidbit funny. I think of Mr Smith's (Hugo Weaving) oratory on the "smell" of being a program in the Matrix, the human smell. He says its saturates him, and that he feels infected by it. I have not thought too greatly on this description, at least not since high school, but it comes back to me know. The smells and tastes and textures of the world, I want them to saturate me, to fill and surround me. I have been washing great swathes of dishes from the cooking endeavors of late and think of the dish, filling over with warm water and how it rises around it; or how I submerge a dish into the water to fill it up. Being that dish, that bowl or glass, and letting myself succumb to the earthen gravity of this place, its tidal thickness, its picturesque fat-flaked snowfall.

I am returning again to a state of general happiness. It was lost to me for a spell - four, six, maybe eight weeks - while I lacked the time and energy to savor my labors. Since Thanksgiving, I think the state has been returning to me, gradually; my baseline rising as the day shortens and my obligations become more specific and, in that way and others, less demanding. I have stacks of books, comics, movies to attend to; friends near and far to call, write to, thank; and the warmth of familiarity both new and old dawning. Temporality is increasingly vague, my sense of self pleasantly unhinged in time but increasingly bound to place or places. I sense myself-in-the-world in a different way. A paper I wrote for Professor Deane Curtin on the characterological virtues of the landscape comes back to me, perhaps expecting revisions and additions. I want to be open to a landscape that, I feel, is increasingly open to me, welcoming with its own austere sacredness.

I looked out on San Francisco Peak earlier, its summit shrouded in rich white and gray cloud cover, and its body blanketed in stolid pines and snow. Its beauty played pleasurably on my heart, my eyes; and I hope that, if it were given the appropriate form, it might find pleasure in what I have written lately.

Harvest, Thanks, and Stamina

2010-12-01T13:39:00.000-08:00

My semester is closing down with papers rolling along, presentations coming together, and certain minor homework assignments being consigned to the waste basket. The days in Lincoln were refreshing, enthusing, and surprising; I return with just enough rejuvenation to get me through. Conversations with friends, unremembered acquaintances, and family have left me with a strange sense of myself. I am not feeling displaced, but perhaps dislocated; a term with particular weight in the classroom. In Flagstaff, I do not feel dislocated so much as that I feel dislocated from the realities of Lincoln and I think I have even when I was living there. Now, though, I sense a gratitude and assurance that allow me to dwell somewhere effectively, vividly, even if it is only briefly. When I lived in Lincoln, activity took on a sort of burden that slowed it all down and discouraged me thoroughly. Upon returning from Flagstaff, I was baking, chatting, reading, biking, debating, sharing drinks, sparking conversations, trading phone numbers, setting dates and making plans... it all came upon me, even sleep felt much more like sleep than I really expected. (The latter, likely the result of my gradual sleep deprivation and the demonic softness of my bed.)

It is strange to think that I have so little time left to get so much done. Then, I go to Lincoln for two week for more family, friends, acquaintances; concerts, coffee dates, conversations; baking, cooking, and plenty of eating. I only now had the attention and time to read a letter from Miss Mary Depuydt and I feel so blessed, given her own consternation, to sense such peace, excitement, and activity in the world; a world in which I feel increasingly integral and participatory. The work right now feels more and more like keeping up the pace before the deadlines pass.