Tuesday, January 31, 2012

Paper thin wall, pt 1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Saturday, January 28, 2012

More Thesis - Community, Meaning, and Geography

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

Wednesday, January 25, 2012

Thesis Musings

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

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

...

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

Wednesday, January 18, 2012

Haiku & Tarot

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

...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Saturday, January 7, 2012

Others' Dreams

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!