the country i remember, part i

It’s autumn in the country I remember.

This is the opening line of Trumbull Stickney’s poem “Mnemosyne,” an elegiac meditation dedicated to the titular Titaness, the Greek personification of memory and mother of the nine Muses. A few weeks ago I memorized this poem with the help of my friend, Jason Daniel Baker. Learning poetry, like learning to sing a song, helps me to experience the musical and emotional effect of a poem's craft in a way that is visceral, rather than intellectual. I'm going to start saying/writing "learning" rather than "memorizing," because memorization smacks most of rote duty and accumulated detail (dare I say trivia?), and less of the dynamic process to which memorization is but an aid.

I bet many of us can recite a few lines we were forced to regurgitate as kids--let us chant "Full fathom five thy father lies" or "Whose woods these are I think I know" in chorus!--without necessarily having a sense of what the lines mean to us, if they mean anything at all. I know this has been true for me when I learn by rote, rather than by heart--two clichés that touch on the canyon that lies between knowledge acquired through instruction, and the richer stuff we become acquainted with when instruction shines its small, pointed light into the dim universe surrounding us. Much like a star, instruction can lead us to discoveries, but it cannot illuminate the entire field of our experience at once. (Even the sun only touches on one half of the Earth at a time.)

In the process of learning a poem, I notice things I don't notice on the page. In the case of "Mnemosyne," for example, how Stickney's shifty verb tenses spin a web of emotional resonance. One of the most striking tense shifts in the poem comes in the penultimate stanza:

But that I knew these places are my own,
I'd ask myself how came such wretchedness to cumber
The Earth, and I to people it alone.
(Lines 20-22)

In line 20, the speaker acknowledges that, in spite of the contrasts between the country he romantically recalls in the poem's tercets, and the destroyed, desolate space he witnesses in the present-tense refrains, both "countries" exist in the perpetual present of his memory. Regardless of whether the mountains he gestures toward are where he once "lived" (see line 16), line 20's jostling return to the present reminds the reader that all the elegies ever written are incapable of erasing the eternal return played out in our memory. Mnemosyne, as an invocation of memory and artistic birth, shows us the two sides of Stickney's inspiration——the sorrowful corners, the persistent longings, the compulsion toward beauty, its succour and inadequacy. Even as the speaker bemoans the loss and decay of his mythic country (political, geographic, however you may read that), it belongs to him as much as he belongs to it.

These thoughts lead me to ask whether national and regional identity are not similarly dynamic, and impossible, relationships.

....to be continued....

A Taste Intervention for Ladies Everywhere*

*Now with 50% More White Male Gaze

Sure, rolling out the trope of the male gaze can be tiresome in this post-feminist age where all gazes are equal (cue tweeting songbirds and gamboling puppies), but some days that gaze’s good works in the community demand recognition.

Exhibit A:

A recent commercial for Sabra’s (admittedly tasty) hummus:

I can hear what you’re thinking.

“But it’s FUNNY!”

“Oh, come on, that Chinese guy’s hilarious!!”

Of course it’s funny! Didn’t Freud teach us that nothing makes us laugh like uncomfortable revelations? What could be funnier than a bald admission to (white, middle-class breeding) women, “Yes, we really are watching what you’re eating. And judging you. ALL of us. Even the Asian food service worker whose livelihood depends on your ‘bad’ taste—for yes, he also recognizes that his ‘Chinese’ taste is bad, and secretly wishes to join the ranks of the white, button-down-wearing, hummus-eating master class!”

What’s that you say? That I’m missing the irony? That the commercial is a parody targeted at dudes, who stereotypically DO need taste interventions, NOT ladies, especially thin, white middle-class moms? That the fantasy of being married to a man with good taste who raises his children in the path of good-taste righteousness, in spite of his wife’s sad “addiction” to “junk” (poor soul!), is but a gentle satire?

The OED defines parody as “a composition in which the characteristic style and themes of a particular author or genre are satirized by being applied to inappropriate or unlikely subjects, or are otherwise exaggerated for comic effect.”

The genre being satirized is clearly that of rehab interventions, the same cultural script that gave birth to catchwords like “carefrontation” and television abominations like Celebrity Rehab. That this script is exaggerated for comic effect I can’t deny. That’s what makes it funny! We recognize the trope, which tells us, “hey, we’re doing this for her own good,” even as we also recognize the ridiculousness of the “problem.”

Or do we? With obesity both a statistical epidemic and a media obsession, with foodie-ism and Alice Waters holding court, IS the parodied “problem” not a problem we identify as a real one? And can’t Sabra count on viewers’—particularly a demographic like thin, white middle-class moms or their aspirational counterparts—to make that connection?

To my mind, the commercial is parodic, but fails to be true parody because irony is not the point. We are not invited to laugh at the accusations Janet Reidel’s family and neighbor (I use this term loosely, given the problematic class/race dimensions of the deliveryman’s character) bring against her in the name of her own “well-being.” Neither does the parody show us anything new—rather, it chases it’s own tale (pun intended) like the tautological monster much advertising is.

Rather, we are invited to become uncomfortable, in the Freudian sense. And that “we,” the commercial let’s us know all too clearly, is a certain category of women, represented by Janet Reidel. (I say “category,” lest all those aspirational Janet Reidel’s who don’t happen to be female, white, middle-class or breeders feel left out.) The commercial acknowledges a system already in place, pokes fun at it in order raise anxiety in the viewer about her eating habits, and then ends with the product in question restoring order to the known universe.

Not only is the empowered male gaze, represented by the husband, son and deliveryman, watching, that gaze apparently is taking notes and conferencing about the “problem,” all the while Janet’s young daughter stands idly by with the dish of hummus. Like a timid alter boy, she hesitantly passes the hummus to her mother as she glances at her father. Accessory to her “recovery,” schlepping the goods of man, and most surely internalizing the message that she too must maintain vigilance over her food intake, this little girl knows the price of being found to have “bad taste,” as should her mother, if she wants her own daughter to consider her (Janet’s) image one of aspirational value.

Saved! Without Sabra and the male gaze, poor Janet Reidel might never have thought of her health or her “tastes” in quite the same way.

The food police are real, my friends. Take heed, and hide the Goober Grape.

man-womanly, woman-manly...?

Currently I'm reading Mating by Norman Rush, a novel set in Botswana in the 1980s. Thus far, it is a fantastic read. I'm especially impressed by how believable and intriguing the female narrator is. It's pretty rare that I can lose myself in the narrative, trusting completely that the particular woman relating the tale is "real." Too often, I feel as though a scrim separates such narrators from their audiences, as though the authorial eye/I had swaddled the speaking subject in a type of low-level radiation discernible only to members of the gender/class/race/type supposedly "speaking." I guess you could call it the authenticity meter, though that phrase feels a little presumptuous--in spite of my ardor for Chaka Khan, I am not every woman.

But I am ONE woman. A woman who can tell you that the way women narrators written by men narrate their bodies generally is the first bleep on the radar scren. "Sweat trickles between my breasts," or something of that ilk, pops up in the narrative. BEEEEEEEEEP.

I couldn't tell you the number of times I've thought of my breasts as "breasts," because it hasn't been that often. Generally it's when someone else's gaze or hands are involved in increasing my awareness of their existence. In other words, largely in sexual, or sexually-charged, situations. Because, somehow, the word "breast," when not applied to chickens or followed by "cancer" or "feeding", has been sexualized in my mind. (Yes, I do blame society.) The fact of having breasts is not very interesting to me. If I were a narrator, I can guarantee you that their existence would only be interesting when their involvement in the plot of my life was interesting. Namely, during sex, or breast feeding, or getting any sort of medical test performed on them. Definitely while shopping. Most of those actions have plot value. The fact that the breasts, in themselves, exist does not.

It's not (obviously) that my daily activities of bathing, dressing, working out, et. al. somehow are performed independently of them. It's just that I don't think of them as plot-movers. "The king died, and the queen died of grief." What happens if that shortest plot read: "The king died, and the well-stacked queen died of grief." Who cares?

Well, if the queen trudged through a desert in her elaborate costume, and chronicled the discomforts of her trip...perhaps what happened to her breasts would be interesting. Both to her and her readers. Say her whalebone stays caused her discomfort. What language would she use to tell you about this? Would the sweat "trickle?"

"Trickling." If I'm sweaty, I might deign to say I'm "sweating," in spite of the old saw about women not being horses and glowing (or something). "Trickling" is a word that sensualizes the experience of sweating. It adds a writerly sort of drama that living day-to-day with a female body, I can assure you, hardly resembles. It is its own plot, and it has nothing to do with the narrator.

So, if the shoe is put on the other foot....what happens if a female writer creates a male narrator, and this narrator is to have a fight scene that escalates in the men's room when (say) his arch enemy is espied via a mirror as he stands at the urinal?

Do men narrate to themselves when they visit a urinal any more than a woman narrates her trickling sweat? (And if the sweat were near another body part...say the armpit...would that author choose the word trickle? Food for thought.)

I imagine not. Though, to be honest, I'm sort of intrigued about how I would narrate that moment. How could I make it real? How could I make it feel real without falling back on trying to feel up my narrator vicariously? Without objectifying his experience of his own body?

I suppose the first step would be to write about using the loo as I do, then changing the verb "sat" to "stood." Then important plot-driving details like, "scrutinized the etchings on the back of the stall door" to "noticed in the half-mirror a jagged scab on the side of my nostril. Fucking hotel razors."

Could it be that simple?

Writing gender interests me not just in terms of character study, but in terms of how a writer writes embodiment via an "I" speaker, especially if that "I" speaker is of a different gender. What could be a more challenging exercise than trying to realistically narrate the thought-process of a character in an intimate moment with the self—especially an intimate moment as routine, and thus half-consciously dealt with, as using the bathroom? It would be hard for me to not want to talk about the mechanics of it, because it would be necessary for me to imagine the mechanics in order to try to get into that place. And then, it's really hard to think about the mechanics and not write about them, if only because the mechanics are INTERESTING. I'm not a dude. Urinals ARE interesting to me, in as far as they are unknown territory frequented by half the population.

Circling back to Rush's narrator in Mating...thus far, I believe the unnamed protaganist's narration of her physical experience. One way Rush makes that work is by delivering an overwhelmingly self-aware narrator who's interest in anthropology and the position of the audience is rivaled only perhaps by her creator's. Another way is by avoiding letting his own interest (whatever that may be) in women and their bodies hijack the speaker's narration. Her descriptions are only as writerly as she herself is writerly (which is very) and they only wax garrulous on topics that interest her.

We are given a cursory description of her physicality, but even then the details are delivered in a straightfoward, unromantic fashion, with little time spent extrapolating on the details of those deatils. I still have no idea what color her eyes are. Why would I? This character isn't interested in what her eye color means to others, and it hasn't come up as a pertinent plot point yet. No villager has told her she looks like a ghost because she has blue eyes, for example. This is the kind of moment when this narrator would deliver that kind of information. Otherwise, it's not important to her.

Which isn't to say her body, and its effects or non-effects on the people around her, are not interesting to her. But while the narrator clearly is able to objectify (or could we say objectively view) herself within her milieu, her ruminations on her body, and its actions, only appear in ways that advance the plot and add contour to her character. As a result (and a big plus, in my book) we do not suffer a writer's interest in his character's, er, formal properties, at the expense of the work as a whole.

P.S. The post title is not in reference to the picture. That is one gorgeous lady. You know...unless she's a man, of course.

negative capability

Wow. If I had a nickel for every time someone said "negative capability" in grad school, I might not be working a day job. And yet, it's a phrase that I would have a perversely difficult time defining if a random stranger were to ask me what it meant. I absolutely have to sit and mull over it for a few minutes, and parse jargon, before I remember. Then I usually laugh, because it's pretty funny for my brain to be continually in doubt about a concept that revolves around....continuing in doubt.

When I wrote my last post on unicorns, the subtext seems to have been my struggle with negative capability. More Wordsworth and Coleridge than Keats, I suppose, my usual process with a poem is to start with some sort of image, event or idea that makes me want to know more. KNOWING is, or has been, immensely important in my life. If I'm depressed, I want to dig around and try to find the "cause," or "problem." If a poem isn't working, my old instinct was to always analyze sound, meter or image to find what didn't "click" into place. In other words, the "problem."

Last month I was following a series of articles on the New York Time's Opinionator blog by Errol Morris entitled "The Anosognosic's Dilemma: Something's Wrong, and You'll Never Know What It Is." The series loosely, but fascinatingly, explored the idea of the human mind's ability to know unknowns, or to seem to not know (or unknow) phenomenon considered by other sources to be knowns. One of Morris' dominant metaphors is that of anosognosia, an affliction where a person with paralysis does not appear to know he or she is paralyzed. Another riveting anecdotal example involves a man who is told wiping lemon juice on his face will make him invisible to cameras. He then tries to rob a bank, and is shocked when he is arrested after being identified from footage taken by a security camera.

I mention these articles because they touch on the issue of the perceived "problem" of not knowing something. Morris briefly discusses Surrealism, and automatic writing, as well as the hysterics documented in Salpétrière, as examples of allowing the brain to show the self something that self doesn't "know" it knows. I imagine Keats would have said to Morris, "yes, my dear sir, you have described states of negative capability quite nicely, except for the part where you keep pursuing knowns!"

A problem wants a solution, in the same way that a question wants an answer...at least, according to our habitual practice of syntax in conversation and composition (I'm thinking here of essay more than poetry). When habitual syntax goes out out the window, what are we left with? Some might say a truth or knowledge that we don't even know we don't know yet.

If in a cluster of grapes there are no two alike, why do you want me to describe this grape by the other, by all the others . . . ? Our brains are dulled by the incurable mania of wanting to make the unknown known, classifiable . . . It is pointless to add that experience itself has found itself increasingly circumscribed. It paces back and forth in a cage from which it is more and more difficult to make it emerge . . . Forbidden is any kind of search for truth that is not in conformance with accepted practices . . .

I quote Morris' excerpt of André Breton, because it is an excellent way to tie together the idea of creative "problems" and negative capability. A teacher of mine used to get VERY annoyed when I referred to poems or groups of poems as "projects." I think she felt that "project" implied that the poem—the flashes of the previously unknown or unseen that appear in poetry, appearing to surprise even the poet herself—already existed, leaving the poet's task to one of excavating and arranging....not unlike the way academic scholars or thinkers like Morris excavate and arrange information in order to reveal something previously unknown to their audiences.

And yet, I believe that scholarly pursuits are just as much guided by negative capability—an example Morris' series makes quite nicely. At no point reading his essays did I get the sense that we started with a clear map of his "project," then proceeded down the outline to the conclusion he had identified from the outset. Rather, there is a creative meandering in the essays that takes us from cultural artifact to cultural artifact—mirroring, I imagine, the process by which his thoughts on anosognosia and knowing unknowns were stimulated. (He makes a point in his notes to mention that the whole idea started when he Twittered a definition of a stupid person.) In other words, accepting that the end of the fifth installment of the essay might even end without any solution to the "problems" of "self-deception" and anosognosia...but rather an acknowledgment of a few of the mysteries surrounding us.

It is, of course, at times, deflating to be faced with so many unknowables when one has spent thirty-plus years being goaded to "know." Believing that the pursuit of knowledge was the good fight, and that knowing is the half of the battle that prepares you to win the war. (Sorry, G.I. Joe. You are indeed an American hero.) How many years were spent trying to know the wrong thing—trying to know what I never knew I didn't—and perhaps couldn't!—know?

With this in mind, I am grateful for John Keats' poems and letters in a way I never suspected I would be—grateful to finally begin to understand (and next time someone asks me about negative capability, I think I'll know how to respond!) that understanding isn't the point of a poem. A poem can teach you things you didn't know, and it can share facts. It can be knowledgeable, in the way that we understand that word, and it can inspire one to gain more knowledge (I'm thinking in particular of Pound here). But at the end, if there isn't a relinquishment of intellectual knowing (i.e. mastery) in favor of imagining or intuiting our way to spheres of experience greater than our "accepted practices" have deigned show us (a state Fanny Howe might call bewilderment)....I'm just not sure it's the kind of poem I want to write.

the unicorn

Years ago, a friend told me she had been invited to be a unicorn at a private party that moved around the city, expressly for the purpose of letting moneyed couples explore their swinger /exhibitionist inclinations. You might ask, as I did, what a "unicorn" is, in this sense. She replied, "A unicorn is a single woman who cruises parties for multiple partners. They are rumored to exist, but no one has ever seen one in nature."

More recently, my friend, poet and writer Colie Hoffman, also got me thinking about unicorns. They appear in some of her magically surreal prose poems that I had the chance to read when we were at Hunter. I vaguely remember a scenario that involved unicorns playing baseball. In this scenario, unicorns in humanoid postures seem to suggest humans can attain an idealized form by elevating a mundane pastime (apologies to those who pray at the batted altar) to one of mystical meaning. Or, that our human hunger to believe our fantasies and ideals can somehow form a transcendent logic that is at home in this world.

As some of you know, I have the privilege of working a day job in advertising that magically doesn't eat up all 12 hours of daylight. I also have what I consider to be the privilege of working in design. Even when my job is boring, there is the satisfaction of making things orderly, pretty, or functional, and most usually some combination of all three. I like organizing closets and making collages. I like type and colors. I like ordering information. So, all in all, this works out remarkably well.

Recently a printer contacted me about submitting one of my designs to a contest. This happens on occasion, and is always flattering, even exciting. Since I've been focusing on my writing over the past few years, the energy I'd been pouring into design took a hit. These moments of reflection help stoke my flame that still burns for design, and reminds me that I might, after all, have the touch. That maybe there is hope for me yet at being more of a William Blake or Robert Bringhurst than a poor man's Wallace Stevens, toiling behind the scrim of a gray flannel suit.

However, these moments also pose uncomfortable questions....have I made the right decision to spread my energies around, in this day of increased specialization? Am I wasting time trying to do too much, be too much? What IS that Most Important Thing? Could it be design for consumer markets, when I thought it was Art?

This spiral continues, and the cheap seats begin to bark tips at the unicorns on the field:

You can't eat poetry.
Advertising is a career for the masses, art for the few.
You're still "creative," even if you're not an artist.
There're more benefits in being an art director than a poet.
Why don't you write something like "Twilight"?
Good luck with all that, kid. You'll never buy a house.

But I'm not a kid, really, and I don't believe in unicorns. When models are hired to circulate at parties in various states of undress, either selling vodka or just the illusion of sexual availability, I don't believe the illusion they are selling. (Of course, I'm not the target market.) And I believe, Pollyanna-ish as it seems, that most members of said target market also don't believe in what they are being sold...they're buying into how safe the idea is when it's divorced from the threat of reality.

My friend who "performed" as a unicorn at the aforementioned underground parties told me that her job really was to talk to people, and to wander around. I'm not going to pretend that her experience was in any way bound by the monogamous heterosexist narrative this comment implies. This was her take-away from the experience--that the unicorn was a unicorn because the unicorn wasn't real. The unicorn was extra-human, a figment of the imagination. And if she did choose to engage with couples...to break down the line between fantasy and reality...well, she never shared that with me. I suspect that might be because the reality of the event (so many arms and legs, the impossibility of three-way eye contact) made the pre-game illusion much more interesting.

When I saw the first window ad for Diesel's "Be Stupid" campaign months ago, the line I'm shuffling toward drawing in the sand between Teams Unicorn (where the teams are consumer design and poetry/non-consumer art) got a little clearer. This campaign represents exactly the kind of work I could be doing. I could be manipulating rhetoric, cultural symbols and psychological motifs into profitable advertising ventures. I even think I might be able to be good at making that kind of unicorn--the type that touches on some of our basest human desires and raises those desires to the level of an ideal. The desire that substitutes "creative" for "stupid," and counts on a society's anti-intellectual terrors to fill in the blanks. Or the desire that substitutes luxury goods with self-worth. That appeals to aspirational identity, and uses said rhetoric and motifs to make that identity emotionally fulfilling. The unicorn who frolics in sweet meadows, backlit by soft spring sunshine, silken mane buffeted by the wind as a chance ray of light reflects off the horn that springs from her forehead like an aesthetic messenger of Zeus.

Then there is the unicorn in the baseball uniform. Is this unicorn ever really safe? This unicorn that stands on two legs, one hip stuck out as she throws a baseball into her glove (somehow), and glares at the competitors. This unicorn whose mane is stained with sweat and clay. Who, by playing a human game, reveals us to ourselves--our human ways suddenly absurd, for what could be more ridiculous than believing any of our logics can be transcendent, or that any of our ideals can be perfection?

And yet, that's what we do over and over again, and that's the unicorn I want to chase. The unicorn that pulls humanity, in all its absurdities and beauties, into high relief. Not the unicorn that clicks shut like a box, a cipher of a desire that, while also all-too-human, somehow seems to push me further from becoming more human and further into a mountain of consumer goods.

It's not that I don't love my consumer goods...my feelings are certainly ambivalent here, as I'm ever-so-much part of the machine I critique. It's really that my life project is to explore what makes us human in a way that brings me closer to humanity, within myself and (perhaps aspirationally!) within others...not to study how to push human buttons from behind a curtain.

There....line drawn. Imperfectly, and certainly with logic flaws. Inconsistent. Contradictory. Perhaps even ephemerally delightful, like a unicorn playing baseball.

Batter up.

me and my animal

I've been thinking about animals more lately than I can ever remember thinking about animals. Part of me blames Mary B. McHugh, who during our time at Hunter introduced me to a thousand and one ways one might consider an animal...and indeed, perhaps come to prefer to BE an animal. (Keep your eye out for her work, she's dynamite.) Part of me blames my twin obsessions of psychology and poetry, which lead me to puzzle over what the animal means within my writing, and thus self. Animals appear in many recent poems, either as a cow, dog or alligator, much to my surprise. The cows started sneaking in first. Now there is the ungainly, threatening but attractive figure of an alligator lurking in some newer sketches.

In some way, the speakers of all my poems reflect a part of myself. (Surprise!) Maybe that part is small. Maybe it is a part I would otherwise cast out, but which must exist for the sort of empathy required to write from the perspective of another to be channeled. On one hand this makes me despair--for if one is only ever writing about one's self, then how can it ever be useful to take on the mantle of another? Isn't the ruse just too obvious? And aren't the ethical problems of speaking for another and/or appropriating their speech not worth the trouble?

Well, if you were Jung (and sometimes I pretend to be him myself), you might say, "No! Ridiculous! Poppycock!". You might then say, "Did you not read my theories of the animus/anima, liebchen? And are you not convinced that there are shadow selves darting in and out of your consciousness as though it were but und closet?"

Perhaps. I find Jung's categories within the animus/a to be intriguing. I much prefer the idea that I am a core self working through my shadow selves toward a wholly realized self to Freud's feuding triumverate. While the animus/a's gender categories Jung created feel a bit old-fashioned, I do resonate with the idea that I might be slogging through the following shadow selves: The Athlete/Muscleman, The Planner, The Professor and the Guide.

I love Jung's premise that a human being, in her/his best manifestation, reaches the final stage of mediation between all these parts...and then is able to shuttle between selves (or I might say types of knowledge and intuition) without sacrificing any of the parts.

I might like to add the Animal to the list of shadow selves. For the body is, most purely, an animal like any other. It tells us when we are hungry, when we are aroused, when we are tired. It finds physical means of expressing its anger or joy or sorrow, in a manner quite divorced from the way we "think" or "recognize" our emotional feelings. How else to explain those terrible moments when we want to cry and can't, whether it be because our minds associate physical crying with emotional relief, or because our social selves feels the pressure to respond to an event.

And yet...who would say that our bodies are not integral to our selves? Okay, Plato would. I sure as heck wouldn't.

And yet...do I not live a life that is primarily in denial of my body's needs? And thus, at some level, deeper needs of my whole being?

I thought of this while cleaning off our dining room table the other day. For the past two years, the table has been buried under manuscript drafts, photocopies of articles, half-used journals, books, mail, computer cords....in other words, it's been my desk. So, Shyam and I have been eating...pretty much where it's most convenient. Which in a New York apartment, where there is a strict no-eating-in-bed rule, means the couch.

For two years, we have eating sitting side-by-side, facing the television, plates balanced either on knees or on the coffee table. I have been nurturing a frustration with this arrangement the whole time, but of course did nothing about it. After all, I had to have a work area, and there just was nowhere else to put my piles. (Or was lazy. You be the judge.)

Then this weekend I finally moved those piles. And now we have begun eating at the table again. It feels...strange. It feels strange to look at Shyam when we're not in a restaurant. And given that we do not eat the majority of our meals in restaurants, it feels strange often of late. But strange in a wonderful way...strange in the way moving into a new home feels strange.

But it's not only the strange feel-good-ness of actually communing (read: kvetching about our days) while we eat. It's also the way eating changes when one is actually communing while eating. We both eat slower, breathe more between bites, perhaps pause and rest for a moment. Usually because one of us is chattering, but also because it feels good!

I hate eating quickly. Something physiological happens, I swear, when I'm eating with someone who eats quickly. It's as though an animal (athlete?) wakes up inside and says, "OMIGOD!!! SCARCE RESOURCES!!" and then I begin to eat more quickly, too. I practically feel the fight-or-flight hormones racing. It is the antithesis of, as the French say, l'art de vivre.

This little article I stumbled upon sums this all up very well with key points to help "Discover the Art of Eating Well":

1. Hyrdate. "Mmmm, aperitif!" Or water. That's good too.
2. Breathe. "(Sigh)...life is good." Or, life is hard....but now there's a break.
3. Extend gratitude. (see above)
4. Engage the senses. "Mmm, that smells like....looks like..."
5. Savor the first bite. I think you smell what I'm cookin' here.
6. Chew well.
7. Slow down.
8. Observe.
9. Complete the practice.
10. Notice the effects.

When I allow myself to take the time to follow these steps, they come rather intuitively. Of course, it's hard to muster too much excitement about a peanut butter sandwich or ramen, you might say. But why? It's time taken to nourish the body, and by extension, the self. It isn't necessarily whether truffles and foie gras are involved, but the ceremony itself.

And it's also a way, I think, of keeping our inner alligators in check, without denying they exist. To feel animal desire urge us to devour a juicy steak, while our more highly-realized self says, "It ain't gonna run away, and no one's going to steal it. Let's celebrate!"

Though, if you do give in to your inner alligator...well, there's a ceremony for that, too. But it's nice when the Guide shows up to wipe her mouth.

bodies of knowledge

Though I've been trying to set myself the post-graduate task of one blog entry per week, last week's entry fell by the wayside. I had some scribblings about cultural code-switching, but after the fun and the drain of festivities planned in anticipation of my best friend Lisa's wedding, I wasn't feeling too bloggy. Inevitably when I looked at the notes, the small flame that had lit that fire had extinguished, and I put the notes aside for another day when the spark returns.

Do you experience that same phenomenon? I know writing, and the creative life in general, requires discipline. But if I don't have the fire within for that particular creation, it's very difficult to push it through. I have to thank my friend and teacher Donna Masini, among others, for helping me come to terms with this ebb and flow. At Hunter, Donna drilled into our heads from day one that "willing" a poem was often a dead-end strategy. That it was often more productive, and kinder to the host (i.e. ourselves), to let the unfinished poem lay fallow rather than beat our intellects against the Muse's door. Of course there are times when, without will, I'd write nothing. But it is not the will that reveals the poem usually, but the will that puts me in a place where I might stumble upon the beginnings of a poem. Those of course are the lucky days.

I don't mean to suggest that I consider the poet to be some sort of medium who is "possessed" by a poem, but who has no direct role in that poem's creation. For me it just sometimes feels like that when the quick cold lightening in my belly announces inspiration. When the poetic instruments, or organs, are roused from sleep, and begin to dance with the mind and body.

The poetic, or creative, instrument. Could this be a third essence, or idea, or substance? For the past few days, I've been reading An Introduction to St. Thomas Aquinas, the 1945 Modern Library edition edited and introduced by Anton C. Pegis. And let me stress the "introduction" part, as I have yet to make it past Pegis' introduction, which for me has been a mind-whirling good time of parsing out where Aquinas split from the Platonic tradition and set the 13th century's britches on fire. Or not, considering that many of his Neoplatonic contemporaries thought his more Aristotelian theory of man as a composite being, for whom body and soul were inseparably important, was just plain wrong-headed.

I can see why a world that disdained the body as largely a housing for the purer "Intellect" and/or spirit might be rocked to the core by Aquinas' view that "man is a knower rather than a thinker, and he is a composite being rather than a mind" (Pegis, xxiv).

Marinating on my own poetic process over the past few years, and how torn I feel about relinquishing head knowledge to body knowledge, I've often put this struggle in feminist terms. The knowledge I feel bubbling within, what my intellect begins to intuit but often strains to decipher clearly, is precisely the type of body knowledge, or knowing, that my feminist mothers' writings (Cixous, Stein, Rich, Lorde) urge the world to acknowledge, even as baby feminists such as myself struggle to accept that this knowledge is valuable.

Confession: I have doubted. I might say I was taught to doubt, and raised on doubtful elixirs that poisoned me to the worth of my own knowing. But whatever the causes, the Doubt of my own composite nature, twin knowledges, instruments of knowing and thinking, exists. I still fight to tear it out at the roots.

And yet, I constantly stumble upon dudes--here an old Catholic dude, no less--who sort of say, to be human--not just to be woman--is to be a knower of many things. A composite of forces.

Here I admit this an interpretation of Aquinas based on scanty reading and no scholarship. I probably project more than a little pop Gnosticism onto it. But ride with me. I admit I am feeling my way around, toward a knowing, rather than thinking, progressing through the discrete white rooms with tables, at right angles, resisting the pencils that suggest I scratch out a proof.

I think the reason I love poetry is that its proof is in its feeling. I'm not going to label Aquinas a feminist per se, though it IS bolstering to do a Google search of "Aquinas" + "feminism" and find that these ideas are circulating in other skulls. What I am trying to get at is the import of self-knowing. Trusting the knowledge that might come from sources other than the socially-recognized "intellect." Something that you might not have proof for (hey, we can't all be masters of philosophy), but that is intuited.

This weekend I spent some time with Esther Gokhale's (Go-clay) book Eight Steps to a Pain-Free Back. It ain't the Summa Theologica, but it is a fantastic example of one person following the path of an intuited knowledge. In this case, a woman who suffered from excruciating back pain.

Gokhale spent years studying what she calls "traditional" societies, such as those found in Burkina Faso, India and Portugal, where back pain, even among elderly manual laborers, is largely nonexistent. Approaching the issue through the lenses of biomechanics, photojournalism, history and anthropology, Gokhale developed a method for preventing back pain based on training the modern body to return to its pre-modern knowledge. The comparison of pre-20th century and post-20th century medical drawings of "healthy" spines speaks volumes itself.

Basically, she shows you how to sit. And lay. And stand. And walk. And let me say—even after a day and a half of trying some of these exercises, it is amazing to feel the spine settle and the muscles release in a way that feels like a return to a sort of physical innocence. All the pictures of babies and small children doing their intuitive biomechanical thing don't hurt either.

During one of my sitstretching sessions, Shyam asked what I was doing. After giving him the short version, he started flipping through the book--and laughing. He found the idea that babies "know" how to sit correctly to be a tad ridiculous. This at first made me angry. As anger is an umbrella emotion, I looked under that umbrella to see what was there. I found frustration, disappointment, exhaustion and sorrow. Why sorrow? Because yet again I had bounced against a fundamental lack of respect for "other" types of knowledge that I suspected (feared is perhaps the better word) could not be resolved.

Having spent much of my life passionately defending feminist principles to audiences who were at best bemused and at worst scornful, this moment felt like another in a long series of being patted on the head and told to go back to my funny little projects. Of course I comforted myself with thoughts like, "he's just afraid of what is different and foreign to his ways of knowledge." Cold comfort, that.

When we first met, he told me that he felt his life had been a little too Apollonian, and he needed a Dionysian influence. To my eternal amusement, I was that Dionysian influence. (Those who know my day-to-day habits will see the amusement in this.) I think maybe he was also saying, "Hey, I have my worldview, and I'm attracted to yours, which is not mine. But don't expect me to join your tribe so easily." I'm not one to change my principles on a dime either, so this was at least a meeting on the grounds of respect as well as a proverbial drawing of a line in the sand. Exciting at first. Tiring, even alienating, at other times. I will be charitable and imagine there have been moments when he's felt this same mix.

Later in the evening, we took a walk through the neighborhood. I couldn't help taking note of the posture of the small children we passed. It was remarkable how their biomechanics were so consistent. Gait and posture were the consistent gaits and postures of new beings whose bodies know how to move, ineffably.

Shyam teasingly asked if I was keeping track of all the babies' postures. (And in Carroll Gardens, ladies and gents, this is no mean feat.) But when we got home and I wriggled my way into another attempt at stretchsitting, he did join me in trying to sit like "a straight-backed baby."

This was a feat of sorts, though I did wonder later whether presenting the whole idea in terms of Thomism (even if only as rhetorical device) would have expedited this process. I think I'm glad I resisted that tactic.

Photo Credit: Tamara Bonêt, "Indian Woman (Maiden) Sculpture WIP"

walking the songline

This weekend I am in Providence, RI, with my partner Shyam's family. Shyam's mother leaves books, magazines and news clippings throughout the house, and often there is a small pile waiting our arrival, each article addressed to its intended reader with a yellow Post-It. These articles might be notices of school, church or shop closings, notices of weddings or passings of classmates or neighbors from the "old" neighborhood. For me, there are usually recipes, general interest articles about things French (today, a piece on the delight that is the macaron) or fashion spreads. These clippings both flatter and charm me with a version of myself, as seen by Shyam's mom—in no small part because of the way these themes repeat in my own family's understanding of things I love. Perhaps the taxonomic ordering of identity, at the hands of a family member, is all the more special for the way particularities are framed--like curio cabinets, these clippings feeds us with shadows of ourselves, seen.

At the same time, these small signs of familiarity are a self-perpetuating phenomenon. Clippings on political correctness, perhaps one of my traits that Shyam finds (among others, I'm sure) trying at times, never make their way into these piles. Nor do clippings on radical political insurgencies, or the progress of the Khmer Rouge trials. I imagine in part because these interests of mine are not the kind any of my family members necessarily wishes for me...but then what parent or friend really wishes tragedy, violence or mundane hatreds to be in their loved one's world? As a younger adult I tended to view this kindness as a rejection of sorts. Today I think I begin to peer through another prism of the dodecahedron that is the ways of love, and am grateful.

Of course, I have friends whose parents' lives have been dedicated to radical social and political work, who prefer to recognize these strains of common interest in their children, rather than petty bourgeois inclinations. This, too, is a way of love—a self-loving self looking for self in future generations. I would imagine self almost always finds some strain of that shared family self, too, if one is looking thoroughly. I don't find this impulse to be negative, though I can understand why some might find it creepy, but one of the human drives characteristic of the parenting principle—of which teaching, if not other forms of social parenting, is certainly included.

Are not the selves we construct, the qualities we've developed on our own, not the values we often value for our children (wrongly or rightly) as well? All the more loving, then, when that child's combination of departures from and alliances with the family fold (for there is always this tangle) are recognized.

But what if I were to depart from this psycho-semiological mumbo-jumbo for one cotton-pickin' second, and consider these departures and alliances from another perspective? On the bedside table in the bedroom we often sleep in chez Oberoi, I found a copy of Christopher J. Moore's book In Other Words, an editorial compendium of words that are difficult, if not impossible, to translate, and what translation (however slant) reveals both to and about the translator. In the introduction, Moore mentions the Aranda* word for dreaming, aljerre.

For Indigenous Australians, dreaming is a vital way of holding the created world together. British author Bruce Chatwin writes, "Aboriginal myths tell of the legendary totemic beings who wandered across the country in the Dreamtime . . . singing the world into existence." If a tribe's Keeper of the Dreaming fails to carry out his or her "dreaming" task, walking the songlines that put the world together, the Earth as we know it would come to an end. (14)

"Tribe" is a term not infrequently employed as a synonym for "family" (at least, by me). I spoke with one of the Keepers of the Malloy Dreaming (my father) yesterday. He had been on summer vacation from his teaching job for a whole two days, and our conversation went something like this:

M: What're you up to?
D: Oh, just enjoying the heck out of myself, playing in the yard. . .
M: Any plans for the summer?
D: Well, I'm taking a trip next week to go visit some folks I haven't seen in a while.
M: Oh? Who's that? Where're you going?
D: Taking the bike [read: motorcyle] out to Texas and Oklahoma for a few days. I'm going to catch up with my dad's brother, Bobby, and see my old commander at Fort Sill.

I can count on one hand the number of trips my father has made without his beloved life-partner, my beloved step-mother, in the twenty years they've been together. I can count on one finger the number of times I've heard any mention of a Great Uncle Bobby. That would be during the conversation, loosely transcribed above.

My father and his siblings have been estranged (by choice) from my grandfather (now long deceased) and his family (more or less) since before I was born. There are histories of abuse that run long and deep, about which I know only a little, but which I felt composed a steady-but-minor theme in our family songline. My reaction to the news of this Uncle Bobby, and my father's impending trek on a 20th-century horse through the tumbleweed-y landscapes of Texas and Oklahoma, echoed otherwise.

Astonishing! This image of my father, a figure of a man almost wholly unknown to me, taking off for such an adventure, with characters to whom I am apparently connected . . . and yet not. The writer in me immediately was envious. I commented to Shyam that I wanted to be a camera trained on my father during his trip—I wanted to read his reactions, feel the landscape, interpret and know this Great Uncle Bobby through my father's eyes. All of which is not only impossible, but proprietary and perhaps creepy in the ways that children can be creepily proprietary of their parents.

And yet . . . I like to think that underneath these knee-jerk immaturities, the excitement I feel for my father's trip is one born of love—the same sort of love that makes my father demand I order in French when he takes me to a French restaurant. For him, pride in my capabilities express love. For me, the drive to know everything (creepy or not).

My father is walking the songline of his life, and the song will change in ways that touch, but do not include, me. Probably in ways I will never understand, even remotely. But him following his songline shows me how we continue to put the world together—parent and child, teacher and student—simultaneously. It also shows me the ends of a child's egoism—where the belief that the child's songline somehow becomes the entirety of the song—bleeds into an orchestra of Keepers young, old and—like Great Uncle Bobby—shadow.


*Caveat lector: For readers who, like me, have a bad tendency of demonstrating their minds when traveling or at urbane parties, I couldn't find any specific mention of a language called Aranda, but a list of languages spoken by the Arrente people for whom the Aranda district of Australia was named. Lord knows that Wikipedia should never be used as one's primary definitive source, but it is often mine.

whose soul is not a clod has visions

FROM A PLAY: A PUBLISHER'S SONG

I lie in the bath and I contemplate the toilet-paper.
Scottissue, 1000 sheets—
         What a lot of pissin and shittin,
         What a lot of pissin and shittin,
Enough for the poems of Shelley and Keats—
All the poems of Shelley and Keats.

—Muriel Rukeyser

My dear teacher and friend, Jan Heller Levi, introduced me to this Rukeyser gem a few months ago. This morning, spent in near-raptures with Keats' "The Fall of Hyperion," I couldn't help but think of Rukeyser's seeming-condemnation of Keats' work. I also couldn't help but wonder whether a 1,000 sheet roll would be enough to scrawl out the 530 lines of "The Fall of Hyperion" in my rapidly-degenerating script. (Note: will try this later. Rainy Sundays and railroad apartments were made for such tasks.)

I don't know enough about Rukeyser to say whether she despised the poems of Shelley and Keats, or whether this poem is more of a statement on the disposable, compost-able, ever-recyclable nature of poetries. This morning I lean toward the latter interpretation. For years I found Keats excessive, his lyric cloying in its enthrallment with sensuous beauty. Mayhaps—yeshaps—because I fight my own inner Romantic constantly. Like a man with a pretty mouth and pockets full of Goetze's caramel creams, Keats gave me the high I was most susceptible to—seasons of melancholy mists sweetened by mellow fruitfulnes, that chatty urn chanting, to the beat of my aesthete heart: "Beauty is truth, truth beauty [.]"

And then, "The Fall of Hyperion." I mean, SERIOUSLY, ya'll. This fragment-poem is described by Harold Bloom as Keats turning away from the "sentimentality" he felt drove earlier poems such as "Ode to a Nightingale." Yet, the question that ends "Nightingale"—"Was it a vision, or a waking dream? / Fled is that music—Do I wake or sleep?"—rings similarly throughout "The Fall of Hyperion," with a marked shift in the question's underlying anxieties. Keats' speaker in "Fall" takes the waking dream as a given—"Fanatics have their dreams" and "the savage too," but now the question is not whether the vision is to be doubted, but whether it can be written: "pity these have not / Traced upon vellum or wild Indian leaf / The Shadows of melodious utterance" (4-6). But most importantly—whether these visions may be written in ways that "save / Imagination from the sable charm / And dumb enchantment" (9-10).

The introductory stanza goes on to posit, in a surprisingly democratic manner (at least, in my shamelessly ahistorical reading), that anyone "whose soul is not a clod" indeed has the vision and drive to "speak, if he had loved" (in the way Keats thought love to mean something similar to Simone Weil's famous injunction, "Absolute unmixed attention is prayer," and the fruit of that prayer poetry). That is, "if he had loved, / And been well nurtured in his mother tongue" (14-15)—and what a tremendously important distinction that is!

Reading Keats in such a way takes me back to Rukeyser's riposte, and socially-conscious poems (such as "The Ballad of Orange and Grape") that ask difficult questions—and make grim insinuations—about what happens when one is not "well nurtured" by any tongue, mother or not. Do the "great" poems then become shit-smeared sheets because of illiteracy? Or is it the forward progress of poets, a progress Keats' "Fall of Hyperion" gestures to in spirit at least, that allows old visions to become fertilizer—that which, in their decomposition, foster the future?

Patriot, Patria, Pater...quid est?

Barring errors in the pathetic bit of Latin I can still pull up, the title of this blog summarizes (via a bad language proof) a big thing that's on my mind these days.

I should preface this by noting: I am currently back in the academic fold, and loving every bleeding second of it. A friend asked me how the program was going, and the only image that I could come up with was that of a lover you can't stand to be away from. Fortunately for me and my colleagues, I am relatively well-adjusted about love. I can and do stand being away--but the passion does not abate. Ah, intellectual masturbation, artistic flagellation, how I do love thee.

A characteristic of being back in the academic fold is that, once again, I spend time with people who think seriously about things like poetry, ethics, etc. Not always at the same time, of course. I would never claim that everyone in my program were involved in grassroots movements or even registered to vote. (Well, they better be registered to vote.) But, in general, these are people who do think about their relation to their country--whether that thinking takes the forms of righteous indignation, fear and loathing, anxiety, etc. (Times are tough, kids. Few apple-cheeked flag-fliers in these parts, these days.)

So, I do feel a little guilty blogging about what I happen to know people are actually thinking about it. To save you, dear reader, and myself the ignominy of trudging through yet another tortuous blog entry on pent-up liberal angst, I'm going to cut right to the chase:

What is patriotism?

I asked S. this yesterday, while suffering another weepy bout of self-serving sorrow and fear that the country is barreling down a mountain in the dark, headed right for a granite wall. The sorrow is self-serving, as I observed to S., because it is predicated on a sense of entitlement that I am not sure I am right to feel. After all, why should I feel entitled to freedom, health care, the right to choose what goes on with my girl bits, peace, etc.? In a true democracy, it is my fellow countrypersons who, along with myself, design the parameters of our rights. We have the guidance of just over 200 years of government, an old document called the Constitution that we (used to) take pretty seriously and a whole bunch of conflicting viewpoints vying for a voice to guide us.

So, whither this sense of entitlement? Is it that I never was good at group projects, or is it that the idea of sublimating my beliefs to the 51% of Americans who (so far) appear to believe Sarah Palin is qualified to be the next president REALLY bothers me?

Being a child of the so-labeled "Entitlement Generation" by the hair of my chinny-chin-born-in-'79-chin, I tend to flagellate myself about the tendency to "expect" too much. Though, if I realize that my expectations may not be "fair" or "justified," I tend to wonder if I really can be lumped in with that crowd. It's hard for me to say. But, I am working under the assumption of responsibility for my generation. Let's carry on.

Lately I feel that I am experiencing a second adolescence, where my country is my parent and I am the disillusioned, angry, idealistic teen. I feel that I am seeing my father-land with clearer, older eyes, and the child within is angry, hurt and righteously indignant in the face of the perceived injustices acted upon me by this so-called father.

I am horrified by the war(s) perpetuated by the hands of those who do not fight.

I am horrified by the looming threat(s) and ever-slippery legislation challenging the one right I never expected I'd have to fear losing (i.e. Roe v. Wade).

I am horrified that my mother is racking up debt so she can afford to buy her medication during the "donut hole" days.

I am sickened that our country thinks less of its children's health and welfare than it does of its old-boy networks of oil greed.

I am disgusted BEYOND disgust at the mockery of progressive-ism (is that an -ism?) that is Sarah Palin's nomination.

And underneath all of these jolting energies is a profound sorrow. It feels similar to the sorrow I experienced years ago after my first adolescence, unpacking the baggage I carried from my short history as a subject in the Kingdom of My Parents, whose parental choices were not always good, whose luck also was not always good, and who had the audacity of being (gasp!) human.

It's the sorrow that recognizes the vulnerability of the child I was, or say the citizen I was. It's the sorrow that weeps to realize that while my "father" and "fatherland" have not acted against "me" on purpose, they definitely acted against the guiding principle of "father"hood -- that of caring for and protecting one's "child." (I am throwing quotes around because when I compare my feelings toward the country to those toward my parents, I am not addressing specifically my father, just the idea of the father.)

Growing up in a military family, I was trained to never ask what my country could do for me, but what I could do for my country. After all, my country was the best place on earth. Just ask my dad. Just ask his tee-shirts that swore he'd fly 10,000 miles to "smoke a camel jockey."

And I loved my country, the way a child loves her perhaps-politically-misguided father--without questioning the validity of that love, with the blind trust that marks all of our childhood attachments to caretakers.

Deep down, I am ashamed to be taking my country to task for its wrongs in the same way I have been ashamed to take my parents to task for past wrongs. The main difference here is that my parents are human, while the country is humanoid. Created by and run by humans, but lacking the appendages and faculties by which healing most easily occurs (i.e. an intellect and heart, a mouth for communicating, arms for hugging), a country has only time by which to heal the wounds of past mistakes.

The dominant American rhetoric regarding post-adolescent angst and anger at parents can be summarized in two phrases: get over it, and/or get a shrink. There is a certain amount of validity to each point, though we all know the timeline for "getting over it" varies widely. It depends on personality. It depends on the parent. But most particularly, it depends on the history, and the graveness of the wrongs--are we talking about not having much freedom to go to parties, or abuse?

I would like to ask Asian-Americans how they feel about WWII internment camps. Has the wrong been assuaged? If so, what accomplished that? Was it time? The fact that their grandparents who remembered the injustice are dead? Because everyone around them (the aggregate intellect and heart that is the base of a country) said it was sorry? Because they got a shrink and just got over it?

I digress. There are so many digressions possible here.

Returning to the point: entitlement. Does one have a right to feel a sense of entitlement toward one's country? Do Asian-Americans have a right to feel that they deserve(d) reparations for the wrongs of internment? Peter Levine's book, The Future of Democracy: Developing the Next Generation of American Citizens helps confront this question:

Patriotism is a love of country. For most people, it is not a passionate and exclusive and life-altering love. It's more like love for a blood relative, perhaps an aunt. It doesn't involve choice. It doesn't require a tremendously high estimate of the object's intrinsic qualities. (You may admire Mother Teresa more than your Aunt Theresa, but it is the latter you love.) It implies a sense of obligation, including the obligation to understand and be interested in the object. It also implies a sense of entitlement: you can expect your own aunt, or your nation, to help you in ways that others need not. Both the obligation and the entitlement arise because of a sense of identification, a "we-ness," a seeing of yourself in the object and vice versa. (Levine, 146)

According to Levine (and to a little etymological game-playing with the Latin root pater), maybe this sense of entitlement isn't something about which I should feel shame. Maybe it's actually the mechanism by which patriotism actually works--where "obligation and entitlement" are the two-sides of the tug-o'-war that is the democratic We in action.

When I was living in France, and John Mellancamp saved me from despondent hours by bringing a bit of Americana into my apartment, was that like getting a letter from Aunt Theresa? Was it a way of soldering the tie that binds, building my sense of obligation by fulfilling the needs to which I have become entitled by virtue of my citizenship?

These are big questions. I will continue noodling over this.

Consider the Lobster

Today is a sad day. I read in the news this morning that writer and thinker David Foster Wallace committed suicide Friday, September 12th. This marks the first time since Benazir Bhutto was assassinated that I have actually cried while reading/hearing the news. I almost cried when I read about Palin's nomination, and have almost cried every day since details about her platform and her history have emerged. But those were almost-tears of political frustration, disappointment and fear future-tense. This is different. My feelings about Wallace's suicide are those of grief and loss.

A few of the reasons this loss resonates so deeply:

1. Wallace was young. 46.
   
2. I loved his writing, in particular his essays. His writing entertained, challenged and opened my mind in a way few contemporary essayists have done.
   
3. The world of American letters cannot afford to lose such a mind right now. Ever. But especially so young.

Part of me is angry. I'm angry because Wallace's nonfiction writing gave me hope, and I want more. I'm angry because it gave me comfort, and I think it gave comfort to other American writers/thinkers who are bewildered and aghast with the state of our country, both culturally and politically. Perhaps part of this comfort was the sign that live, creative intellects are hard at work, interrogating not only the "high" culture of literature, but also the culture that produced said intellect. He was not only writing avant garde literature--he was an American writer thinking seriously about facets of his/our culture.

Suicide is the ultimate incomprehensibility, for myself at least. It is a negation whose profundity has no edges in the dark night of possible negations. It is the ink well, that once spilled, is spilt, irrevocably.

Yesterday S. and I watched Wings of Desire. It was the first time I had watched the whole film at once, without falling alseep, in spite of my dear friend C.A.'s attempts to the contrary in college. I can't believe I ever fell asleep watching this film. I may need to watch it again, if only to take comfort in Damiel and Cassiel's sorrow before human suffering's mundanities and extremes.

I am full of the echo of Cassiel's cry, "Nein!," when the young man with headphones jumps to his death off the roof. In the background, two people urgently rattle the gate separating them from the young man, their mouths contorted as they yell at him--ostensibly trying to dissuade him from his alluded act. Neither Cassiel nor the man can hear them, as Cassiel hears only the man's thoughts, and the man hear's only his thoughts and his music.

No part of me wonders what D.F.W. was thinking when he hanged himself Friday. That is a romanticization (in the purest sense) that I feel would be a betrayal of the greater calamity of the act. All I can see in my mind's eye is the emptiness of the room around him, how the vitality and energy must have been sucked out of it. How his wife's stomach must have fallen even before she entered the room, sensing the here-not-hereness that is being in the presence of the dead. But I cannot continue even this train of thought. Read not the romantic here: read only horror, confusion and sadness.

Today there is everything that there was yesterday, less at least one. Less more than one, but less one that lends me, particularly, the sense of what can be lost between sunrise and sunset.

If you, too, need comforting, there are many people voicing their feelings along the same lines on blogs around the Internet. Here's just one link to a line of comments where I found sorrowful community.

Overmuch Update.

Well, campers, it's September 1st. Happy Labor Day! Happy farewell to white shoes! Happy barbecue and beer drinking!

And, happy update on the month spent trying to avoid overmuch.

How did it go? Here's the recap:

A) We ate out less, and I spent more time at the gym--membership for which was already paid. Result? I lost three pounds, and am better at push-ups than I was a month ago. That wasn't precisely the goal, but I ain't complaining. The proportion of my upper body strength to lower body torque is distressingly high, and I worry about having to hang from a skyscraper rooftop one day. Step one toward surviving a rooftop fight with assassins: GOLD.

B) I read more newspapers and journal articles...on-line. Of course, the semester started last week, so I dropped way too much money on books. But they are for school. So even though that sort of plays into the "bigger, better, faster, more" progress model, the fact that I study poetry offsets the potential pitfall with its high rating on the chart of economically-useless-pursuits. Result: SILVER.

C) Shopping. Uh, well that could have gone better. However, I am proud to say that I purchased only a few items for the "school year," and did return the one outrageously-priced pair of jeans that I could not, under any circumstances, justify keeping. I mean, I only even wear jeans two days a week max (can you say Saturday and Sunday?). So even though I was feeling smug about losing three pounds, I fought off the desire to offset that accomplishment by succumbing to fashion affluenza. Result. BRONZE. Good try.

D) I learned to make three kinds of Korean banchan, including white radish kimchi. Not only did I preserve vegetables that might otherwise have perished for future consumption...I earned major international points with my friend S.Y. She told me I am now an honorary Korean. Wow! Who would have thought that putting down the affluenza tip would lead to global unity? Result: GOLD.

Now that the experiment is over, I hope to continue to practice avoiding the affluenza bunny. This will be challenging, as I've been designated fashion coordinator for my sister's wedding. Granted, it's her money and not mine. But I am already wrestling with how absurd it is to justify $200 heels. . .even if you can dye them and use them again. And wrestle is not too strong a word, my friends--I can see very persuasive arguments on both sides. After all, if you find Vera Wang dyeables marked down from $400, and you know you can consider it a business wardrobe investment (my sister is a soon-to-be lawyer, who will indubitably need cocktail attire in her professional future). . .does the tax write-off balance out the excess?

And if a poetry anthology drops on your foot but your partner is asleep . . . does he hear you yelp?

Back to work. Probably will be less consistent in posting for the next few months, but in the immortal words of the governor of California: I'll be back.

Lemon Yellow Light

The news is bad, kids. BAD. Russia is pulling a sneaky-pete with South Ossetia and Abkhazia, and yours truly is frankly worried.

Some of you know I tend to be a bit of a Cassandra. Or, Chicken Little, if you will. I will preface this comment with that excuse: I am concerned that Medvedev and Putin have a plan to try out some Soviet-era domination schemes. I'm concerned that this will happen during a time when the prevailing global police force (i.e. the U.S.) is too overextended, over-compromised and overwhelmed with domestic issues to possibly consider any sort of grand army march over bad intentions. Then I'm concerned that I'm even thinking this way, because I'm ALSO concerned that we (the U.S.) play police too frequently. And THEN I think about all the bad jokes I've heard involving European nations, and the reasons they are all still conducting their governments in their native tongues and not German....and I wonder.

Fear mongering works, as you can see. I'm conducting my own self-experiment to determine just how successful fear-mongering is in America. To date, here are the suspect behaviors I have that, I feel, are influenced by fear-mongering:

1. I have rental insurance. And yes, I paid extra for electronics coverage, even though I've never been a victim of a fire, flood or break-in. And no, I will not cancel it, despite clearly seeing the apparatus that makes the insurance machine tick hard at work. Because I'm afraid of what if.
2. I quit smoking. Years ago. And I bug S. to quit smoking, because I'm convinced he will die. This is not an irrational fear--I watched my grandmother die of lung cancer. It's not good, and the research doesn't (always) lie. However, I cannot control what my darling does. I can only sigh ponderously and make weepy doe-eyes at him every time he lights up, hoping this will persuade him to think about what if.
3. I'm unhappy if I do not have vegetables or fruit in a meal. Because MY GOD people, do you REALIZE what havoc that can cause?
4. When I travel abroad, I spend more time planning out safety than planning our itineraries. This to me is a shameful, shameful admission. What a waste of time and energy! I still manage to slice off a finger, bruise a muscle crucial to the walking process or catch a cold everywhere we go. The fact that I cannot accept that it is my destiny to be clumsy abroad is like something out of Beckett. I spend hours searching for collapsible finger splints and slip-safe shoes only to twist an ankle randomly in a sidewalk crack. But.....what if that penicillin prescription were necessary?
5. I notice bags left unattended. EVERYWHERE. Thank you, MTA.
   

Because, indeed: what if.

Now, I'm not about to come full circle and suggest that we should all ignore Russian hijinks and fear-mongering, that we should throw insurance policies and vegetables to the wind (though I do think insurance is the oddest invention yet for controlling the middle class) and take to the streets for ice cream. No. But I do think a little reflection is warranted.

I don't feel we can ignore history while contemplating skirmishes such as the one emerging in Georgia's provinces, or the ones (oops!) we're up to our necks in in the Middle East. Too much has been ignored already, and I fear that we are setting ourselves up for some colossal troubles as a nation and as a world. (There's that word fear again....)

World War I was started by the death of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. I remember that from World History class in high school. I also remember what my history teacher repeated ad infinitum about every conflict we studied: tensions had been mounting. TENSIONS HAD BEEN MOUNTING. Is it just me, or have tensions been mounting for years?

Okay, that seems self-serving, doesn't it? Just because the U.S. has been involved in a war for six years doesn't necessarily mean that global tensions have been mounting. So is it just my paranoia speaking? Is it the comic-book-caper in my mind that whispers, "Watch out for Russia...they're waiting until you're weak so they can strike!"

It's not Russia...particularly. It's world politics at large. Paul Krugman's editorial today summed up what I'm trying to articulate, in a way that an econ professor at Princeton can do way better than moi. He gives a fruitful (if abbreviated) reading of J.M. Keyenes' 1919 comments regarding the state of the British economy and the resulting psychology of the urban British citizen, who firmly believed the world around him could not come crumbling down. He makes the following point toward the end of the essay:

"So are the foundations of the second global economy any more solid than those of the first? In some ways, yes. For example, war among the nations of Western Europe really does seem inconceivable now, not so much because of economic ties as because of shared democratic values.

Much of the world, however, including nations that play a key role in the global economy, doesn’t share those values. Most of us have proceeded on the belief that, at least as far as economics goes, this doesn’t matter — that we can count on world trade continuing to flow freely simply because it’s so profitable. But that’s not a safe assumption."

Word to your mother, peeps. I've been thinking this for years (albeit in less eloquent form) and am privately convinced that my diligent contributions to my 401K are really less important than my ability to forage for edible greens.

Of course, now I'm curious whether his striking a chord with me makes him a Chicken Little, too. Fortunately or unfortunately, I've never been one to ignore my gut sense of things. I suppose we'll see.

And what does this have to do with lemon yellow light? Nothing directly. But isn't it a nice way to ice a terrible situation? Repeat that phrase to yourself a few times and see if you don't feel a tad better. It's like a linguistic cupcake.

Good night, and....well, you know. Good luck.

Wow.

When I started this blog, I was determined to keep my politicizing largely out of it. I know I am prone to getting up on my soapbox, and in general prefer to reserve my indignant, self-righteous diatribes for S. (lucky man!).

But--and this is a big but--but today, I read Maureen Dowd's column on Obama and could no longer resist. The thing about Dowd that irks me can be summed up in this editorial. It's not that she's stupid. She's not, though occasionally I find her logic lacking. It's not that she's a bad writer. She's not! It's that she has a way of writing editorial that sets my blood cold, usually by applying inept metaphor and/or offending my politics.

Now, you can't take someone to task for offending your politics. That is the right of a writer, and in this country, the right of us all. But would it hurt so much to adopt a tad more of the finesse of David Brooks (who, as my friend S.M. so perfectly stated, is the only conservative a radical liberal intellectual can have a crush on)? Would it hurt to THINK for two seconds about what her message really is?

Today's editorial is a strong example (perhaps the strongest) of her stylistic wont to annoy. She uses a sloppy comparison between Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice and our presidential candidates to (ostensbily) tease out some of Senator Obama's shortcomings with blue-collar women voters. I'm guessing its with blue-collar workers primarily. It's hard to be really sure from the essay, which bandies about references to "feminists" and "mac-n-cheese"-eating blue-collar woman in the same breath. Are these the same women? Are they different demographics? Is "mac-n-cheese-eater" a real category?

I love Jane Austen. I love PBS for loving Jane Austen, and I love the dickens (pun intended) out of any actor who's played even a wee bit part in a film adaptation based on any of her fine novels. And perhaps one of the first things I learned about Jane Austen whence first a copy of Emma came my way, was that Ms. Austen was British. That's right, British. As in, NOT American. And what did she write about? Comedies of manners involving nineteenth-century British society.

So, let's check out this parallel Dowd makes between Mr. Darcy and Barack Obama. Beginning with their height and slimness, she then extrapolates from "a prayer to the Lord at the Western Wall in Jerusalem, a note that was snatched out and published" to the fact that Obama is all too aware of his own propensity for pride. (This is a grave American crime, apparently. So grave that it, in fact, is British.)

Might it be that the savvy politician suspected his prayer would be so desecrated, and thus chose a spin that would help offset concerns the American people might have with his audacity to be black, educated and opinionated? No, of course not. Clearly, this is just the first step in the epistolary struggle between Darbama and Ameribeth, with America fronting as Elizabeth Bennett, in all her " spirited, playful, democratic, financially strained" glory.

I just ate lunch. I don't really know if I can muster the energy to unpack the ballyhoo that is this metaphor. But I will give a fighting shot at at least this much: perhaps comparing blue-collar, mac-n-cheese-eating feminists to Elizabeth Bennett is a tad . . . well . . . daft. Elizabeth Bennett was spirited, playful, financially strained and caught up in certain prejudices. But democratic?

Please, Maureen. Please give me a close textual response illuminating how Ms. Bennett was democratic. Because in my reading, she's a feminist, perhaps even a liberal -- but never a proponent of democracy. She demands equal franchise between the sexes, and expects a partner who respects her mind and opinion. BUT SHE SAYS NOTHING AGAINST THE QUEEN OF ENGLAND. She does not mention the vote, she does not mention suffrage. She never suggests holding an emergency session in the Houses of Lords and Commons for a restructuring of the patriarchal model that requires daughters to obey their fathers. In fact, there is the textual suggestion that had her father demanded she accept her first proposal to Cousin Collins, she may have acquiesced . . . or been out in the streets, on her fine, British arse.

Please, for the love of your Lord (you know, the one who didn't mind when Obama's PRAYER was swiped from its resting place), consider your metaphors. This editorial appears like the result of a quick session on the laptop after a long brunch. (One with mimosas. Lots of them.) Perhaps, at this mimosa-laden brunch, you had been discussing your love of Jane Austen, and your secret attraction to Obama's embodiment of the very qualities that make Mr. Darcy a toothsome bit of literary man. Perhaps you then thought of macaroni and cheese, and then perhaps read yet another distorted blog post claiming feminists are turning against Obama out of defiance. Perhaps you lastly thought, sighing, "well, isn't that just like a Jane Austen novel. 'Twhatever shall become of these lovers?"

Perhaps you didn't think at all, beyond the assumption that female readers of your column might appreciate this literary nod to their stereotyped proclivities, and that just maybe they'd consider Obama for the presidency.

My main question, though, is whether the whole thing is but a mish-mash. We all are curious about whether we can, as a country, overcome our terrible history of prejudice. But are you trying to be supportive of Obama by comparing him to Mr. Darcy, or are you trying to put yet another doubt in the mac-n-cheese-eaters' mouths? 'Cuz frankly, I don't see how suggesting Obama is a noble Brit will help his cause at all.

Overmuch by How Much?

I think I've been looking at the etching of "Excess," personified in the being of a pale, fleshy woman who looks maybe a tad too much like me for comfort, for too many days. Maybe I'm starting to see myself in this etching because excess has got me down. Regardless, Monday I will have to find a new bugaboo.

But today is Saturday, my chickadees, and tomorrow is Sunday. And you know what Sunday's children are full of: being fair and wise and good and gay. (And...oh, never mind.)

So in my effort to harness a touch of the fairness, wisdom, goodness and gayness that must mark the lucky child of Sunday, I want to find a way out of the excess mess.

It started Friday when I read Judith Warner's editorial in the NY Times, reprising an article earlier this week about affluent parents' behavior (specifically, their difficulty letting go of control of their children, their demand for exceptional attention and their flagrant disregard for rules).

The latter article caught my attention because, as a teenager, I worked two summers as a camp counselor at the glorious Camp Wekiva in Florida. Camp Wekiva was the farthest from a $10K-a-week camp that you could possibly get. The benevolent members of the Florida Federation of Garden Clubs personally saw to it that children in need had the chance to apply for scholarships, and even for those who did pay full-kitty. . .it wasn't pricey.

My experience as a camp counselor was a fairly idyllic experience, marked by skinny-dipping with other counselors while my junior counselor tended to our bed-wetting wards, confiscating cigarettes from a few plucky campers and occasionally writing snarky nature haiku.

N.B. To my dear friend T.E., I will never forget your prize-winning haiku, nor our chants to the spirit of the sacred titmouse.

Boom goes the sand pine
onto the soft forest floor.
Deforestation!

During my tenure, only one experience still stands out to me--and it wasn't a pushy parent. Rather, it was a camper who, the eve before her session ended, woke with night terrors so severe that she crawled under the bunk, clung to the bed coils and refused to come out.

We had to wake the head of the camp, as no group of terrified 15- to 18-year-olds is equipped to handle such a situation. By the time they were able to pull her out from under the bed, one of her fingers was broken from her grip on the coils. I have never in my life seen such terror in a child. The worst part, of course, was that it turned out that her estranged father, a suspected child-molester no less, was picking her up from camp the next day. And the camp had no choice but to release her to her father's care, per the mother's specifications. That's right, ladies and gents. When the head of the camp called her the next morning to see if perhaps she could fetch her daughter instead (given the broken finger, night-terrors, suspected diddling and what-have-you), the mother refused, and was annoyed by the request.

So, when I read about overly-concerned parents, it doesn't exactly rub me the wrong way. I've never had to deal with them, give or take a few stroller-wars on the sidewalks of Brooklyn, and even if I gripe about their gross sense of their child's entitlement (to, say, lay on a busy CITY sidewalk to better explore cement), it could be much, much worse.

The children, after all, are our future. And no one knows that better than a crack-smoker, isn't that right, Whitney?

Ahem. I digress.

Warner's editorial addresses the effect of "affluenza" on parenting, and considers the potential problems said-parenting promises the future. Her argument is that certain groups of affluent parents cannot merely stop at showing their children all the beauty they possess inside. No, nor can they merely teach them well, then let them lead the way. (I'm sorry, Whitney, but it's too easy.) Instead, they inculcate expectations of privilege and exception based on purchasing power.

I was familiar with the "affluenza" term, but I had never read the exact definition of affluenza. I will share, thanks to my good friend Wiki:

affluenza
n. a painful, contagious, socially transmitted condition of overload, debt, anxiety and waste resulting from the dogged pursuit of more.
n. 1. The bloated, sluggish and unfulfilled feeling that results from efforts to keep up with the Joneses. 2. An epidemic of stress, overwork, waste and indebtedness caused by the pursuit of the American Dream. 4. An unsustainable addiction to economic growth.

You mean, Doctor, there's a name for it? Condition of overload, debt, anxiety and waste resulting from the dogged pursuit of more.

I really thought for a long time that this was the description of living in New York. I didn't realize it was an actual socio-psychological DISEASE. But seriously, pathologizing this phenomenon makes me feel better. It actually gives me hope that the particular malaise I fall into occasionally (say, after buying three pairs of shoe on sale), is not just me being crazy. That there actually is ill-effect to be had by the pursuit of overmuch.

For a while, I thought it was class guilt. I have a tense relationship with shopping....as an inveterate fashion-whore and general aesthete, I can't help but care about clothing (for example). As a reader and bibliophile, I cannot resist having (too) many books. Yet, I notice that after making many purchases (say, the week the toaster breaks, the luggage we've been wanting for years goes on sale and the scheduled-maintenance for our work wardrobes come due at the same time), I do not feel good. I feel actually the opposite of good.

In spite of our "success" in obtaining what we want, in reaching the "next level," I feel overloaded, anxious, indebted and stressed. Even if I'm not technically overloaded or indebted, the anxiety and stress of the stuff tends to lead to feelings of indebtedness and overload the next day when I go to work. These feelings then tend to lead to a feeling of deep dissatisfaction, a lack of desire to be productive (as productivity is linked to stuff) and a depressed desire to run out into an open field, lay down, close my eyes and disappear for a while.

Now. I'm fully cognizant that this may just be me. Truly. I mean, few children have anxiety dreams that involve them being buried in all their toys until they can't breathe. It may be my own particular relationship with so-called pleasure-objects (toys or shoes or books, they are much the same) and the listlessness of a wasteful, bloated existence.

I'm not exactly saying let's all run off and go Walden. Hell, I don't even like camping. But there is something to be said for being content with what I have, and breaking off from the bigger-better-faster-more mentality. There is something to be said for making my way to that empty field and taking a deep breath, taking an hour, and not worrying that I have to get to the gym before 5pm so I can make it to CVS before it closes to get that toothpaste I read about. There's something to be said for just saying no, and, as Ms. Warner has pointed out in other editorials, opting out.

So my new experiment for self-improvement, and in consideration of what this may means in terms of Maslowe, affluenza and poetry along the way, I've decided to opt out for the next month. I'm still hammering out what "opt out" will mean, in practice. As of now, this is what it looks like:

• Make no purchases beyond necessities such as food, soap, etc.
• Avoid "up-grading" any necessity purchases. (This would mean getting the happy hour special rather than paying twice as much for the glass of viognier, for example. I'm not advocating asceticism, but rather temperance. Uh, I mean prudence.)
• Finding things to think about and do that do not involve accumulation or vanity.
• Writing about topics (especially poetically) that endeavor to avoid self-indulgent navel-gazing, or striving to be greater-than or more-than they are.
• Avoid chastising myself for not adhering perfectly to my plan. (Aren't unhealthy standards partially responsible for the affluent malaise?)
  

Other suggestions? I'm all ears. But don't try to one-up me. . .I'm not playing that game again until September 1st.