The Shopping Mall

One day in Colombia, a Sunday, feeling as if I needed a break from exploring new activities and socializing with new people, I decided to make my way to the nearby shopping mall to see the latest Harry Potter movie. The mall turned out to be more or less what I expected: a little slice of America with a few Latin twists. The layout was familiar, with department stores on the first floor, a food court on the second, and a movie cineplex on the third. The department stores had different names, obviously, but they sold the same crap that are customarily sold in American malls--mostly clothes, but also books, electronics supplies, crafts, furniture.... And just like in America, the food court specialized in cheap fast food, and McDonald's stood out from the other chains.

I had some extra time before the movie started, so I decided to take in a snack. I passed up on the ice cream promotion at McDonalds and instead bought a brownie at Crepes and Waffles and a cup of coffee at the Colombian equivalent to Starbucks named the Juan Valdez Cafe. It was at about that time, as I finished explaining to the barrista how I liked my Cafe Americano, that I started to observe a change in my demeanor. I was speaking more fluently and my body language in particular exuded a newfound confidence. I walked with more poise, at a smooth even pace, head erect, shoulders straight, with little wasted motion. I gesticulated more overtly, smiled more openly and easily, and used my hands to add emphasis to my spoken words. In short, I was exhibiting a sense of style, of aplomb. I had found myself, or, to be more accurate, I had found a self, a personality--my American personality. And I'm not ashamed to say that it felt good.

One thing that has always struck me about my friend Jessica is the fact that she had no family. None. I can't even imagine what that feels like. I know people who hate their family members--and for good reason--and want nothing to do with them. And even those people, I believe, are better off than Jessica was. Those people have an idea, at the very least, of what they don't want to be--a certain basis for selfhood, even if it's a negative one. They have some sense of foundation. Jessica, though, must have sensed an emptiness around every clear line, a ubiquitous dark ocean surrounding and threatening her. And I think that played a large part in her eventual demise.

The first day I spent in Columbia I stayed with a friend's mom who, eager I think to demonstrate that her country wasn't a banana republic, took me to a shopping center in downtown Bogota. And I hated it. I hated the commercialism, the shallowness, the overly sterilized appearance, the bland and predictable layout ... everything. It stank of America. This was not, I told myself, what I came to Colombia for. And I couldn't get away fast enough.

But three weeks later, after struggling several times a day with language and cultural barriers, finding myself at a disadvantage in almost every social situation I encountered, feeling as if I had reverted to being a little boy at times, I was ready, if only for a few hours, to come back home. I was ready to go back to the family I hated.

Jessica

I was going to write something about my summer travels this year to Columbia, Venezuala, and Cuba. I had plenty to say--until this morning, that is, when I received a call informing me that a good friend and former housemate, my favorite ski pal Jessica, had asphyxiated herself in the garage two days earlier. Needless to say, I've been pretty upset all day, and my travel adventures suddenly don't seem worth writing about. For that matter, it hardly seems as if I've been gone. My entire summer seems like a very short dream.

When I first met Jessica five years ago, when she applied to join our community, I was not really impressed. She looked and acted like the cliche blonde party girl, not someone I figured I could learn much from or even be entertained by. But she REALLY wanted to be a part of the house, and for that reason alone, I agreed to have her join us. And it wasn't a decision I regretted. I learned very soon why she wanted so desperately to be a part of our household: she had no family. Her parents had both died when she was young and she had been an only child. She had once tried to make contact with an uncle, but he hadn't seemed interested, so she created family where she could, among friends, lovers, and, eventually, in our community at the Lafayette House, where she became, in my view, our most vital community member, the only person in the house who really made us feel like a community. It hasn't been the same since she left.

Mostly because of skiing, she and I became good friends. She helped me through a couple difficult breakups and I returned the favor, learning, in the process, that she wasn't the simpleton I once took her as. I valued my time with her. Our friendship, like most friendships, was on and off, but I felt we were close, that we would both be there for each other in a crunch. Still, I can't say that I ever really knew Jessica intimately. I'm not sure anyone did. There was a part of Jessica that she didn't let anyone be privy to, concealed in layers and layers of happy faces. She had worked for Disney World before coming to Colorado, and she seemed to spend a good deal of effort trying to recreate that experience, trying to turn her real life into a Disney fantasy. In recent months, I thought she was finally coming to terms with the fact that life might not want the same fantasy that she did--that life didn't want to be Disnified--that life, as Rilke says, is always in the right. Apparently, she was struggling more than I knew.

It hurts to know how much pain she must have been in at the end. It hurts to know that the secret world of Jessica could have been so dark and desperate and hidden. It hurts and it scares. And, as I return from my vacation bronzed, well-rested, well-sexed, and stress free, it scares me to think that Jessica's world, dark and terrible, might be more authentic than my own.

Freedom

A while back I wrote a post (Nurturing the Inner Anarchist) explaining how my anarchist values were motivated less by hope for social change than by a quest for self-preservation and authenticity. I haven't changed my mind about that, but recently I've had several conversations with people that have challenged me not so much to rethink my anarchist values but to clarify them.

First of all, I need to clarify what an anarchist society would look like, beyond explaining what an anarchist society isn't (capitalistic, hierarchical, coerced....). An anarchist society, at it's simplest level, is a free society, a society in which all individuals are free. Admittedly, that's a rather worthless generalization, worse than "democratic nation", but it's a start. The next step is to define freedom.

And, if the truth be told, I can't define it. I don't know that anyone can, because I doubt any person alive today has ever really experienced freedom and I won't pretend to proscribe a free society if I haven't ever experienced its primary condition. Moreover, even if freedom could be, at this time, directly experienced, I don't think the experience could be put into words, could be reified. In fact, part of my definition of freedom is that it can't be reduced to information--it can't be entirely abstracted. Freedom is a subjective experience. But, as I mentioned to my blogger pals recently, it isn't private. It isn't solipsistic. Just as our bodies are dependent on the surrounding environment, so too is freedom contingent on the physical body and the environment that creates and nourishes that body. That isn't to say that our minds can't increase our levels of freedom. Our minds, being inseparable from our bodies, can clearly mitigate physical limitations, our "freedom from"--but they can't completely overcome material reality.

So while I can't give a clear and precise definition of freedom, I think I can give a partial, clarifying, picture; I can describe and specify it.

As explained by philosopher Isaiah Berlin, there are two concepts of freedom: "freedom from" and "freedom to". In my description of freedom, the latter takes precedence. I don't mean, however, to minimize "freedom from". Without a certain measure of "freedom from", "freedom to" is impossible. We must, that is, be free from those restraints that prevent us from surviving--up to a point. We must have freedom from food scarcity, disease, jailers, and axe-murderers. We need the ability to live. But not indefinitely. We can't and shouldn't expect freedom from any and all physical limitation. We can't and shouldn't try to free ourselves from our bodies or the environment that produced those bodies. We can't be free from bad weather or from the need to eat or from the inability to move mountains with our thoughts or from death. To carry the concept of freedom to such ridiculous extremes means to create an idea of freedom that is essentially negative, a freedom
that isn't derived from living but from being free of humanity, or even existence--a freedom from the very thing, life, that makes freedom possible. And that leads me to the second concept of freedom, "freedom to". That, also, in my mind, has to be limited. We shouldn't expect or want to have freedom to do anything--the freedom to run as fast as a cheetah or fly like an eagle or shop like an American. We should have freedom only to do one thing--to become fully human, to realize our subjective potential. What that means to me is that we require the freedom to relate to the world around us completely, serenely, and drunkenly, with the full intensity of our human natures--that we have the means of discovering the radical potential in all of our relationships--that we have the unlimited freedom, as human beings, to commune. I have no wish to become another person or thing, to be free from lust or pain or the human body. Freedom is NOT transcendence. To me, such a freedom isn't freedom at all, but escape--escape from life and from freedom. Real freedom doesn't negate but requires absolute responsibility, something human culture as we now know it prohibits us from fully practicing. And until the material conditions change, real freedom, real communion, can't exist. The individual, then, can't be free until the social conditions he lives in are free, as well. Those social conditions can be changed but they can't, unilaterally, be transcended. And while the individual within modern society can't be truly free, she can, through revolt, by accepting the responsibility of creating a free world, at least attain a higher degree of freedom, more authenticity and more intimate relations, than if she surrenders to the artificial freedom of escapist fantasy.

Part II (Sort of)

Okay, what I meant to say in Part II has been mostly forgotten, but, in the interest of keeping my blog alive, I've decided to post the following, which is an excerpt (and taken out of context may not make perfect sense) from something else I've been writing and which deals with at least some of the themes I hinted at in Part I.

(Excerpt)

A few days earlier, in a grocery store in Bozeman, Montana, I had made eye contact with an attractive thirty-something in the check-out line. I was struck initially by her sexiness. She had the petite body-type that I like, smooth skin, and dewy green eyes. But what captivated me most was her sudden change in demeanor moments before I had made eye contact. She was standing in line, lips pursed, staring directly forward—and then, suddenly, she sighed, dropping her head for a moment and closing her eyes. Then she smiled, faintly, to herself alone, a smile of complete satisfaction. When, an instant later, she raised her head again, she had resumed her public persona. That’s when our eyes met. She smiled at me, warmly but not flirtatiously. And I smiled back, full of light. I had seen something, a flash of transcendence that stunned me. By then it was my turn at the check-out stand, and, by the time I was finished and Jeff had concluded his conversation with the checker, I turned to find her but she was gone, I’m sure never to be seen again.
Until now, that is. Now she was revisiting me, in my thoughts. I recalled her small sigh, her internal smile, and I began to fuse her life with others I have known, and I imagined her story:

I imagined her name to be Grace. She was a thirty-seven year-old former philosophy student now teaching at, say, nearby Montana State University. She had, I decided, recently returned from a trip to … Barbados. A friend from there told her she could stay in her ex-husband’s beach cottage for free, so she decided to take the trip. It was the first time in her life that she had traveled alone and the first time she had traveled period since her divorce.

She found the first part of the trip to be frightening and stressful—she didn’t know how to travel solo—but later, after she met and befriended a fellow traveler named Liz, someone much more travel-savvy than herself, she started to loosen up and enjoy the adventure.

One night, Grace and her new friend went to a beachside bar where they met three young local men, none of whom spoke advanced English but who still managed to convince Grace to try marijuana for the first time ever. Fortunately, the quality was good, and it made her feel more aware than tired. Not only that, it made her horny, incredibly so. Of the three local men who were with her that night, Xavier was the quietest and seemed the least interested in her, and Grace chose him to be her first ever one-night stand. Not only had she never had a one-night stand before, she had only had sexual relations with three other men period, one of whom was her husband and two others with whom she had had two and four year relationships. The idea of casual sex, until that moment, had simply never sounded appealing. In fact, since her divorce over four years previous, she had been entirely celibate. That wasn’t, for her, unusual. Grace treasured her solitude and she had gone without sex for even longer periods, for five years, after breaking up with her college boyfriend and first love. During her present stretch of celibacy, she had had several opportunities for sexual satisfaction, but, out of respect for her ex-husband, she had decided that she wasn’t yet ready. Closer to the point, she had remained celibate as a sign of love. She still loved her ex-husband, and, whether her love was requited or not, she wanted to express how she felt about him in whatever way she could.

Grace had not wanted the divorce. It’s true that she had, for most of the marriage, been unhappy, unhappier than her husband even, and it’s true that she had complained more than he about their situation—but she, unlike him, had always believed things would work out. She did once love her husband. He was in fact the only person she had ever loved, really loved. And she was sure that the feeling she once had had not been in vain, and as long as she remained committed to preserving and/or recovering that feeling, to figuring out its meaning and recovering its poignancy, she would not be ready to abandon the marriage.

She felt that way even after meeting another man with whom she felt more compatible than she had ever felt with her husband, a man with whom she began to have an affair, although she never consummated it. She had strayed not because she was looking for escape but because she had wanted to clarify her situation. She wanted to hurt her husband so he would look real—so that she might again recognize in his face the man she once loved so sincerely—so that she would see him again as human, and, more importantly, so he would see her—so he would see her angst and take her seriously, the way he once did. She did not expect that her flirtation, as she called it, would end the marriage, but she knew it was a possibility. She didn’t care. It felt right. The last time she had met with her secret lover, in her home the afternoon after her husband had left for a business trip, was the last time she had kissed a man.

It felt good to have a secret life outside of her normal routine—to be with someone not as a wife or a student or a secretary or as anything other than herself. It made her feel alive. Of course, she didn’t explicate her feelings so thoroughly when it was happening. She simply found it exciting and wanted for it to continue but without getting complicated. That wasn’t how it worked out.

Her husband, after his flight had been cancelled due to high winds in the Chicago airport, had come home for lunch and found her and her lover in each other’s embrace. And that was the end of the marriage.

She immediately ended her ‘flirtation’ and asked her husband if they could try counseling as a means of working things out, but he didn’t even want to talk to her. All she remembers him saying is that she wasn’t the person he thought she was—that he should have known better.

She tried hard to convince him that she wasn’t a villain, but, especially after his family learned what had happened and her mother-in-law took the time to write a letter saying just how awful Grace’s behavior was and how much her son had been hurt by what she had done—her efforts were wasted. All of their couple friends took his side. He was made the victim. She was to blame. She was cast in the role of a scoundrel.

That was a role she never expected to be playing, and she didn’t like it. So, even though she felt she hadn’t done anything too terribly disgraceful, she decided that in order to purge herself, she would undergo contrition and live as if she were a nun. She didn’t make that choice as a sacrifice, as a submission to her enemies, but because she wanted to. She found it pleasurable, that is, to deny herself pleasure. It felt good, and it proved to herself if to no one else that the others had been wrong about her. Also, because she still loved her ex-husband, or remembered loving him and wanted to express that one-time love in whatever way possible and to keep it alive, it felt good to maintain her allegiance to him. Denying love, she savored more the love she had felt in the past; she underscored it by reducing its surroundings.

Two years after the divorce, she learned that her ex-husband had died of brain cancer. She had not been informed. It was only through a chance encounter that she learned what had happened. And that’s when her celibacy took on a stronger meaning. Her celibacy could no longer be seen as a ploy to get her ex-husband back or as a simple act of penitence but as something more—proof that her love was real and enduring—that love itself was real. Now her motives couldn’t be questioned.

After four years of living not just without sexual intimacy but without any kind of emotional involvement whatsoever, except with her own conscience, she had become a different women, one that a person who had known her five years earlier wouldn’t have recognized. By denying herself all but idealized and abstract forms of love, contrary to her intentions, she began to forget what tangible love felt like, and the memory of her first and only love grew dimmer and was replaced by a more symbolic version, an image of love. Her past became idealized. Love became nostalgia. It required that she do everything possible to restore in her heart a moment from her past that never really occurred the way she imagined it; it required that she not just preserve the past but that she change it. To an outsider aware of what she was doing with her life, she may have seemed like a mad scientist trying to clone and enslave a former lover, turning herself into a monster in the process. She had dreams in which she was walking backwards through a garden of paradise, and, because she was not watching her step, she fell into a hole and she somehow used her eyes to slow her descent, lingering for as long as she could on the visions of the garden above as she slowly but surely plunged into darkness. She told her sister that she felt like a ghost—that she was only remotely a part of this world.

Though she had never read Dante’s Divina Commedia, if she had read it, she would have related to Dante’s epic journey. She too felt as if she were taking a journey through hell: Like Dante, she was going backwards, descending. Having lost her way, she had looked to her past, to history, as a means of finding direction. In her eyes, the journey was not an escape, not a retreat from present reality, but, as with Dante, a journey of artistic awareness. Grace would have understood exactly what Dante meant when his long descent into the inferno suddenly turned into a climb, when, by returning, he managed to find his way out, when his fall turned into an exaltation. Grace felt quite strongly that if she could truly resurrect her former feeling—if she could re-live those moments in which she loved her ex-husband—if she could plunge deep enough, and reach the center—she would escape the hell she had entered since betraying her marriage vows. She would discover the reality hidden beneath the life she saw around her.

Even more important, Grace felt that if she could go back to that moment when she was in love, she would learn whether or not her love was real, and, if it turned out to be false, she could redeem it; she could join the naïve love she may have once felt for her then living ex-husband with the unconditional love she now felt for his memory. And she would thereby sanctify her life.

If Grace had ever really thought about her behavior, she might well explain it as I have above, but, in truth, she never bothered to explain it. She simply felt as if she were still in love with her ex-husband—that deep down, beneath the layers, he was something exceptional, a treasure, and her sincere love would reveal that treasure, even from the grave. In his absence, she would not be distracted by trivial everyday thoughts and needs; her love could find the singular focus it had always lacked and thereby be purged in her ex-husband’s image. That was her hope, even though it hadn’t yet worked out as she expected.

With each passing day, her ex-husband faded further from her memory while simultaneously becoming more of an obsession. He was turning into nothing more than an idea, a faint glimmer, like a snowflake falling away from the lamplight, of whatever he once was. And the harder she tried to remember, the more his image faded. Like someone faced with a clue in a crossword puzzle who can’t let go of the first answer that comes to mind, whenever she tried to think of her ex-husband, she could only imagine the idea, the model, that she had replaced him with. The real person was gone to her.

But that all changed when she walked with Xavier to a private spot on the beach, where she allowed him to slip his fingers down the back of her bikini while, with his other hand, he slid up towards her bared breasts. She was starting to forget, to forget about remembering. She lie down in the sand and allowed Xavier to remove her swimsuit altogether, to touch her intimately first with his hands and then with his lips. And then she reached inside Xavier’s trousers and fondled him, sensing him grow firm in her hands.

When he turned her over and inserted himself, she felt as if she were falling. And then, as if she had set aside a problem and come back to it with a fresh perspective, the answer came to her. She remembered. She remembered vividly the first time she had made love to her ex-husband and what it was like when they first met. She remembered how he smelled, how he looked in the throes of passion, how his body felt to her touch—everything. He had come back to her. But contrary to what she had expected, the visitation was not welcome. After all, her ex-husband had come back when she was again in the arms of another man. She began to see her long bout of celibacy as less of an effort to prove and avow her love and more as an effort to keep her ex-husband from haunting her, from coming back to lay on her life an irremovable curse. By focusing on trying to remember, she had kept her memory blocks in place, had preserved her defenses. But now….

She was frightened. She asked Xavier to stop but he didn’t hear her, so she pushed him off and turned over. Xavier thought she had wanted merely to change positions and took her now from the front. She looked up at the stars, while he continued. She looked harder at the stars and tried again to forget. She tried to disappear in the starlight, staring more and more intently and listening to the sea and feeling the tepid sand on her back, heeding her breaths. She was alert now to every small thing that was happening, exceptionally alert, to the sand flies at her feet and the dew in the air and Xavier’s grunts and thrusts and sweat. When he finished, he collapsed to her side and whispered something in her ear. She didn’t hear him and didn’t respond.

This was not the first time Grace had tried to forget something by smothering the event with an infinity of details, by letting anything and everything into her mind, by opening the filter. That was the first step—to include the event she wished to forget in eternity and attenuate its vividness. Then came the re-focusing, the deliberate will to exclude the event from history. The consciousness.

She focused her eyes now on the crescent moon, focused all her attention on it, to the exclusion of everything else. And from that day on, whenever she looked at the moon, especially the crescent unfinished moon, or when she thought about Xavier or heard his name, she would forget a little more about what had happened that night, about the memory that had come back to her when she had been unguarded. The moon, particularly, became a refuge, increasing in beauty each time she looked at it, arresting her in its return gaze.


There was an article I read recently in the LA Times about memory. The University of Oregon did a study in which they asked subjects to remember words in pairs, such as book/slipper, gown/speakers, or scarf/paper. Afterwards, one control group was asked to try to forget the second word in the pairing, which they did. In subsequent tests, they asked the control group to recall the second word in the pairing after being prompted with the first word. And what they found is that the first word in the pairing served not to solicit the memory of the second word but to block it. Put another way, had the control group been asked simply to forget a random word, their later recall, the study found, would have been better than it was when the forgotten word was paired with another. The first word served to block the memory of the word it was paired with. In the same way, if a person tries to forget a painful episode in one’s life, say being beaten with a broom handle, then, subsequently, the broom handle might actually block recall of the event rather than trigger the unpleasant memory. The findings seemed counter intuitive, went against everything the movies had ever taught us, but there they were, confidently and scientifically proclaimed.


So maybe that’s what happened to Grace. The moon became the first of the paired words, a block to her memory, an impenetrable threshold into a life she had once lived and was now lost to her. The moon mercifully prevented the pain and protected her from her ex-husband, replacing him with a shadow, a ghost, with the person she had first encountered but not understood and not the person who had grown to hate her and whom she had betrayed. That person was cold, had grown cold long before their divorce. That person was a strange, frightening, uncaring beast of a man whom she couldn’t relate to. That person was inscrutable—was all mask. He scared her. She couldn’t bear to look at him. It wasn’t the ghost that haunted her, but the immeasurable darkness lurking behind it.

Xavier wanted to walk her home but she declined his offer. Indifferent to the danger of a woman walking by herself at that time of night, she wished to be alone. And she left him. As she walked along the beach, unsure even if she was heading towards her lodging, she listened to the gently splashing waves and she looked into the ocean, into the dark of the water, as far as she could see. The moon was behind her as she wandered into the tide and kept walking. Soon the waves were going over her head. She closed her eyes and held her breath for as long as she could, trying with her arms to push herself further out to sea. But she didn’t have the will to continue. She came up gasping for air, the moon staring directly at her and the light penetrating her closed lids. Then she swam quietly back to shore, her eyes gradually adjusting to the soft light.

Her life changed after that. When she returned to the states, perhaps worried about another visitation, her passion fell off all together, and, to compensate, she returned to school and poured herself into her studies. Eventually, she obtained a Phd and embarked on a career as a professor at Montana State University, where she met a nice man, a fellow professor, whom she felt no physical attraction to but loved all the same. They married and had a child. She was happy with life, but she always felt that something was missing. Something was wrong—but she couldn’t figure out what it was. She couldn’t remember. Though she lived a life of ease and prosperity, though she enjoyed her job, adored her child and felt a strong affection for her husband, she knew that something was missing.

Years later, as she stood in line at the grocery store, in an unguarded moment, she looked at her daughter and it brought something up. She thought about something very very deep in her past, something about her childhood maybe, perhaps an event with her mother or her grandmother—a voice from the dead, or, well, who knows? I’m making this all up, in any case. But I think she remembered something. Something came back to her—something from her past that made her smile, made her laugh at her fears and which put everything about her life into perspective and showed the silliness of her concerns—something that put her outside of the borders, as if she were an observer of her own life and who absolved her of everything she had ever done, who set her free, allowing the immense sea to swallow her up in its ceaseless, boundless waters. Something happened. Something that didn’t last long, that would fade like an ember falling on damp earth but which, for a moment, made her irresistibly happy, unconquerable. Something.

The Journey Westward: Part One

Last night as I settled into bed, I began to review my weekend, a particularly good one in which I went skiing, saw a movie, had brunch with a friend, dinner with another friend, and attended a house-warming party. For an introvert like me, it was a pretty active few days, with plenty of highlights that I could assemble into a story whereby to shape and preserve a comfortable self-image, creating a weekend personal history that lulled me into what I expected to be a pleasant sleep.

I was wrong. Sometime between 2 and 4 a.m., I woke up, disturbed by a dream, the details of which I don’t remember, except that it was obviously inspired by an extremely trifling event that had occurred earlier in the day: a group of colleagues were talking outside of my office about a party they had attended over the weekend. One or two hours later, when I finally fell back to sleep, I was still thinking about that one small event, bothered by the fact that I hadn’t been invited to my colleague’s party, even though I wouldn’t have gone if I had been invited, and doubly bothered by the gap I perceived between my own life and the lives of my colleagues, almost all of whom are married with children and whom I apparently know so little about—whose stories I’m barely familiar with, whom I affect so imperceptibly. I felt alienated. Though my memory of the night’s remainder is faint, I have a feeling that my dreams continued to explore and develop that one small event, an event that I barely paid mind to when it occurred, but which my unconscious couldn’t let go of and invested with enough importance to disturb my sleep.

In the novel The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Kundera writes about how in the twentieth century the European Blackbird moved from the forests, its native habitat, into the cities. In terms of historical significance, such an event, a radical transformation in the relationship of one species to another, is far more relevant than the Israeli invasion of Palestine or the British withdrawal from India or the tearing down of the Berlin Wall, events that merely altered relationships among members of the same species. Nevertheless, you’ll not find a single history book, or many books period, that mention the exodus of the blackbirds. The exodus of the European Blackbirds is not part of Western history, not part of its self-definition.

The personal histories we construct are no different than the histories we construct of nations and continents: what we leave out is often far more revealing than what we include.

As I get older, I find myself trying again and again to recall those moments from the shadow side of my history—paths I almost took, women whom I almost made love to, actions I thought about taking but never did—the millions of stories that have never been told, blocked now by the surface events of my life, memories concealed by memories. I long to go back to a time that existed before realization, to the woman whose promise was never tarnished by prolonged interaction, to once again be worthy of a grace I earlier failed to recognize, to find the treasure and return to innocence, to a time before I knew disappointment or satisfaction, before history, to take up space once more in the countless zones that the light never landed on.

Interesting Article

citylife

Recent studies show that a person's ability to remember (especially visual stimuli) has much more to do with filtering out irrelevant information than it does storage capacity. It seems that city life makes that filtering process more difficult. At the same time, there are definitive creative advantages to allowing irrelevant information into the mind, thus explaining, perhaps, why cities have traditionally been breeding grounds for artistic and scientific discovery.

The Iconography of my Window

It’s snowing tonight: white glimmers piecing off from a crumbling white sky. If you look closely, and for long enough, your eyes go beyond the flakes in the lamplight and pass into the gray beyond, where you become more and more receptive. You feel yourself changing.

I once participated in a guided meditation that went something like this: Start with your feet. Imagine them bursting into flame. The flame grows hotter and hotter, changing colors as it heats from orange to red to blue and finally to white as the blaze becomes hotter than fire is capable of becoming, transcending itself, passing brightly through the threshold. The conflagration then reaches from your feet to your abdomen and spreads upwards throughout your body until your whole self is a single white flame, immaculate. And now the space beyond your body catches fire as well. And the process repeats itself. It’s as if the world is falling into you, and, through your gaze, is converted also into a pure white inferno. All the universe is white. It empties.

The idea behind icon painting is that the image being depicted isn’t merely a likeness of something else and thereby intended to make the reality and the majesty of the original object present. Icon painting, in the words of Ivan Illich, “is understood as a threshold between two incommensurable worlds, from the perishable and provisional to the imperishable and eternal; from the world of death into the world of life.” As such, unlike the secular image, the religious icon takes on a peculiar sacredness all its own, one that isn’t cast off from another source but which exists within the image itself, as a vision of invisibility. The icon isn’t merely an imitation or copy or even an expression of sacredness but something through which the eternal light radiates directly into the viewer’s eye, an image both borne and conveyed by intrinsic holiness, which holds life and death in its expression.

Western art, by contrast, in attempting “to hold the mirror up to nature,” assumes a certain inevitable poverty in the image. No matter how precisely the image is depicted, it remains a copy, an inferior to the original. And after nature itself, the original original, is successfully converted through the forces of civilization into a commodity, into yet another representation, another image—when nature itself becomes a mere embodiment of its pseudo essence, of the ‘spirit’ it contains, then the entire world becomes a prison from which we futilely struggle to escape. Nothing we see is whole and separable, and the world of dearth that imprisons us, becomes, like suicide as a means of escaping one's fear of death, our hope for salvation. We look to the spectacle to lead us away from the spectacle.

In such a world, the very essence of self implies a neediness. The self becomes a scarcity—something with tangible and real needs and that begs for fulfillment. The world becomes a problem that has to be solved, except that to solve it would destroy creation, because the world can’t exist except as a problem. One helps one’s neighbor because one’s neighbor has needs that one can fulfill, weaknesses that can be compensated for, and the self looks to the outer world to grow not more complete (that’s impossible in a world of duplicating selves) but larger and more resolved, more alien and more invincible. Since everything mirrors something else, satisfaction can never be achieved, even in a world exclusively dedicated to need fulfillment. The original, which is itself a copy, forever reaches back to the form that gave it birth, a form that doesn’t exist. Consequently, our ‘real’ faces are worn like masks while we wait for the right actual mask to be covered by, and we look for love the same way that we look for a new television—by shopping. Relationships become exchanges. Once the world has been reified—once everything becomes a symbol for something else, and once thought (“I think therefore I am”) and the contingent idea of the mind as ruler and creator, becomes the foundation of existence, then the whole world is unified, with only one reality. Everything is borne of the one great law, product of the great mind, and subsequently, as shards reflecting shards, the other, mediated to us by specialists, loses her otherness. No one, including one’s self, is real; one merely symbolizes the real. And the sacred is forever diverted, like endless reflections in opposing mirrors.

The Medieval icon painters never bothered with new techniques such as perspective, the Golden Ratio, or foreshortening techniques, because they weren’t motivated to approximate an outer reality. The simplicity of the image was important because the image was meant to inspire contemplation, a meditative gaze through which a new reality could be entered and explored, and thereby required a certain amount of undefined space and a minimalist formation. The image wasn’t about something, after all. It was the thing itself—and asked not to be interpreted but cherished.

As I stare outside at the snow, I’m thinking about the way Zen Buddhists begin each meditation session with the chiming of a bell: a loud clang that expands and slowly ebbs into silence, empties, like white glowing from out of the darkness and falling again on white, extinguishing itself.

I remember when I was twenty one years old and I had just come back to Utah after a six month long internship in Washington DC. I was forced to stay with my parents until I found a new apartment, and, one night, as I had done throughout my childhood, I pulled the trampoline up next to the glass doors of my bedroom, and I slept outside. But I didn’t enjoy it the way I did as a child. The stars that used to amaze me and keep me awake for hours were no longer so appealing. They were still beautiful, but they were just stars, silent deaf stars that only the right interpretation could make meaningful. They didn’t look back at me.

Twenty years later, as I look out my window and watch the snow fall, I’m learning how to see again.

Sexist Savages

The other night, while driving home from a college basketball game, my four year old nephew invented an activity he called the Christmas game, which involved getting points for spotting Christmas decorations—or at least that’s what it involved at first. The rules kept changing in order, it seemed, to ensure my nephew’s victory. At times, green and/or red street lights yielded points. Other times not. Car break lights were included in his tally but not mine. And at the end of the game, points were awarded for just remembering Christmas decorations from the past, a nuance I had not been clued in on until the game was declared over. Needless to say, I was soundly defeated—fourteen points to five, and, mature adult that I am, I accepted my defeat in stride, without protest.

The maturity of my response was in marked contrast to the behavior of an elderly man I recently witnessed on a TV show called The Adventures of Mark and Olly about two British men who travel to Papua, New Guineau to live in the jungle with an indigenous hunter/gatherer tribe known as the Mek. In the latest episode, the tree house where the two British men have been staying starts to break down, so the tribe agrees to build a new one—about three hundred feet up. Olly, one of the British men, has a difficult time climbing the trees to help with the building process and so has to stay below and work with the women, causing his status within the tribe to diminish, or so it seemed. Later in the episode, after all of the fires in the community have gone out during the extensive rains, something else happens that, along with the tribe’s distinct gender roles and the fact that the women do the bulk of the work, seems to confirm the modern condemnation of primitive life as backward, immature, and, above all, sexist. When the male elder fails to start a fire, one of the women takes the materials inside, and, within minutes, creates a steady blaze. She gloats, and the man takes offense. The two argue until the woman walks away.

What the male should have done, of course—what any non-sexist civilized man would have done—is to graciously admit defeat, smile, and congratulate the woman for her success. In other words, he should have treated her like an adult treats a child, the same way I treated my nephew after losing the Christmas game. The fact that the male elder took offense, that he argued with the woman about the event’s significance, suggests that he might have some very real doubts as to his superiority in the community. In the modern world, you could make a strong case that no such doubts exist. The sophisticated modern male simply laughs off female victories because he knows deep down that such victories are either aberrations or meaningless child’s play—that they don’t really threaten his dominance. In the modern world, the male’s superiority would not be challenged by a simple failure to start a fire better than a woman.

Why I'm Voting for Nader

Of course Nader can't win--I understand that--but that doesn't mean I'm voting for him to merely "express my conscience", as some people like to put it. The truth is that no candidate, including Nader, comes close to representing my conscience. That choice, in our pretend democracy, is off the table. Our representative democracy doesn't allow me to vote "for" anything, because the voting process doesn't, on a personal level, offer me anything of value. What I can do, though, thanks to Nader and other third party candidates, is vote against something. I can vote against the system.

Obama is one of the more reliable sellouts to ever run for office. Due to political pressure, he now supports off-shore drilling for oil, has voted numerous times in support of subsidizing corn-ethanol (the position that won him the Iowa primary), has clearly voiced his approval of "free" trade policies, has said that he won't withdraw American troops from Iraq before 2013, and has back-tracked on campaign finance reform and coal subsidies since it became politically advantageous to do so. He has solicited for and received millions of dollars in corporate campaign support, from the likes of Goldman Sachs, Excelon, UBS, Citigroup, and Morgan Stanley, many of the same corporations who directly benefited from the 420 dollar bailout he approved. And his support of Tort "reform" (making it more difficult to sue corporations), his rejection of single-payer health care, his vote to cap the damages that victims of malpractice could receive, and his vote against an ammendment to cap credit card interest rates at 30% show very clearly that he intends to pay back his supporters with policy decisions that represent corporate interest at the expense of everyone else. It's pretty clear that you can't work "within" the system, a system that is evil to its core, and expect non evil results. And Obama unquestioningly represents the system.

A vote for Nader, on the other hand, represents an honest critique of what our country is doing to the natural environment and to the developing world and to the non-elites within American borders. A vote for Nader represents an honest voice of protest against corporate-dominated America. In short, it represents a protest against abuse.

Let me put it this way: what if someone said that you had to be in an abusive relationship with a person who would beat and molest you every day or a person who would beat and molest you, more mildly, only once a week? That, to me, is the choice we're being given by our two party system. The fact that both Obama and McCain supported a 420 billion dollar robbery--a continuation, in other words, of the American government's practice of taking money and resources from the poor and middle classes of the world and giving it to the elites--only proves my point. And I don't want to cast a vote in favor of abuse, a vote that sanctions and authorizes and legitimizes that abuse. My vote for Nader, who opposed the bailout and who favors placing severe restrictions on the abusive power of corporations, sends the message that I don't want to be in a relationship under abusive circumstances (even if I don't agree with many of the socialistic ideas of Nader). A vote for either Obama or McCain, on the other hand, represents a vote for an abusive system--a tacit approval of exploitation--which, by my definition, is not merely a wasted vote but an unethical one.

Let It Pour

In Act IV, scene II of Shakespeare's King John, just after John has killed the rightful heir to the throne, causing powerful nobles to defect--just as the forces against John are being assembled and his position of power is being questioned--just as everything seems about to fall apart, a messenger enters the King's quarters, looking fearful. The king, noticing the messenger's troubled countenance, speaks:

"So foul a sky clears not without a storm: Pour down thy weather."

The metaphorical language, as pointed out by Mark Turner in The Literary Mind, is both crystal clear and simultaneously loaded with nuance. The messenger's face corrolates to the foul sky and the messenger's news to the rain that must fall before sunny days are again possible. Pretty straightforward. But, considering the context, much more is in evidence. The king's utterance also implies a certain limitation to regal power--a power to command actions but not natures. A king can command a messenger to convey his message but he cannot determine the message's content, not, at least, without distorting its truth. A king can demand a weather report, that is, but not determine the weather. He might even demand that a frown be called a smile and an overcast sky be called sunny, but he cannot rule over natural forces. A king cannot command the skies.

And neither can US presidents or Federal Reserve chairmen--not even with 750 billion dollars.

Since the dawn of America over two hundred years ago, America has fostered a reputation for its cock-eyed optimism. And, at times, it has served us well. An optimistic spirit was needed, obviously, for a small fledgling nation to defeat the mightiest military of its time during the American Revolution. Optimism is a great quality to have when you're young, when you lack the confidence that comes with experience, and when older cagier veterans are trying to defeat you by mere posturing. It's a great quality to have when you're shooting a pressure free throw, for example, and you need to overcome your nerves and let your body do what it knows how to do, trying not to over-think the moment and become distracted.

But optimism isn't a virtue; it's a skill. And like all skills, you should only use it when it's needed. You might be the greatest sharpshooter in the world, but if you try applying your talent to circumstances in which it isn't required--as a means of resolving conflict, say--then you're probably destined for a life in prison. Your skill will be your ruin rather than your saving grace. Similarly, if you apply optimism to a scenario in which your child is screaming hysterically in the next room, your skill becomes a potentially lethal liability, not to mention an effective means of denying responsibility. Sometimes, too, a skill doesn't manifest strength as much as it conceals weakness. A young man or women might become a master at sexual seduction in order to conceal a sense of complete alienation from the opposite sex--to compensate for the fact that he or she can't connect with others on any other level, and so his or her skill works to conceal loneliness and alienation--as a means of preserving the illusion of compatibility with human society. And a mother failing to respond to her crying child might not be an act of optimism as much as it is an act of denial--a weakness of courage, I mean, to face the potentially dire circumstances that await her if she tries to learn the source of her child's distress.

The American financial system has been crying for a long time. Over eight years ago, Ralph Nader sounded the warning that the Federal National Mortgage Association (Fannie Mae) and the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (Freddie Mac) were on track to follow the savings and loan industry of the 1980s and 90s (TheNation). He was ridiculed. Every month of this year, the unemployment rate has increased while Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke along with Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson have been "seeing signs of improvement" in the economy (dumbasses). And now we have the mess that we have.

What's more, though the screaming child isn't being ignored at the moment, the people in charge don't seem to understand what they're hearing. Rather than going in to check on the child, they've decided to spend 700 billion dollars to build thicker walls--as if the problem is with the screaming and not with the threat that the screams are trying to signal. Put in other terms, our financial leaders are trying to amend the message and not the problem. And the reason why is simple: they can't amend the problem, because the problem with the kingdom isn't that it's unraveling and that the king is about to be overthrown; the problem is with the king. The king is illegitimate. The reason they're trying to build thicker walls is because that's all they can do. That's all they have the authority to do.

Karl Marx, in a small book called The German Ideology, proposed that political ideologies are primarily "the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas". To Marx, ideology is a consequent of material social conditions, such as those of private property, and, in order to keep those conditions secure, an ideology is created to justify and idealize the material condition. In other words, the world is turned upside down. People are taught to believe that the ideology created the material conditions and not vice versa. Consequently, human beings come to view their actions as the consequence of inevitable economic factors. Ideology serves merely to obfuscate the very simplistic reality of material life--and to maintain the dominance of the rulers. Ideology becomes the artifice whereby the rulers obtain and maintain the power to rule. False and illegitimate ideology serves to promote false and illegitimate power. A mirage is created which is invulnerable to attack. Consequently, the screaming of the economy, rather than the material conditions of the economy, become the problem that has to be commanded away.

Now, I don't claim to be a financial expert. I've read about fifty articles about what's currently happening and all I can tell you is that our financial markets are a labyrinth I could never navigate ... but I can tell you this: the market depends on material resources and a financial system that creates money (and not value) from debt isn't sustainable. Ideology in the form of rhetoric can't create real long-term value--and real value (of the materials) can't keep pace with the artificial value (of the stocks) inflated by credit and hyper speculation and short-term investment and derivatives and price fixing and debt securities, etc. More specifically, the current crisis is a direct result of material social conditions which require and encourage debt, the same social mechanism that has been used since the dawn of civilization to ensure that assets are consolidated in the hands of the wealthy.

As Wall Street economist Michael Hudson puts it: "The “magic of compound interest” refers to the tendency of savings to double and redouble exponentially, with a matching rise in what debtors owe on the other side of the balance sheet. These mathematics have been operated throughout history, ever since the charging of interest was invented in Sumer some time around 2750 BC. In every known society, the effect has been to concentrate wealth in the hands of people with money. In recent years, one’s own money is not even necessary to do this. The power to indebt others to oneself can be achieved by free credit creation. However, the resulting mushrooming exponential growth in indebtedness must collapse at the point where its interest and other carrying charges (now augmented by exorbitant late fees, bounced-check fees, credit-card costs and other penalties) absorb the entire economic surplus.

This is the point that has been reached – and passed. It has been developing for many decades. But there is a great reluctance to accept the fact that debts cannot be paid."

Summed up: no economy can grow as exponentially and interminably fast as debts--no matter how much they're commanded by the Fed to do so. This bailout has nothing to do with preventing a recession. No market can exist without recessions, and the king can't do anything to change that fact. Recessions, like rainstorms, are not only inevitable, they're also good for the market economy. A recession simply means that money has been invested in an industry that no longer serves the economy's needs, and now that money has to be re-invested in other industries. In the long run, the economy is better off after the reinvestment takes place. By trying to prevent recessions, we only inflate the bubble and make the ultimate crash a little bit more severe--but the recession still comes. The king can't prevent the economy from functioning like an economy, but he can ensure that the recession doesn't hurt the people in charge; he can ensure that it protects his illegitimate power, provided we go along with it, provided we continue to believe that we're simply the victims of inevitable economic forces rather than illegitimate rulers. And that's what this bailout is all about. It's a chance to keep the bubble inflated long enough for the illegitimate people at the top to cash out before it pops. The pop, though, is inevitable.

Just before the messenger arrives in the throne room, King John has been informed of the death of Arthur, the rightful heir to the crown, and the lords give him an accusative look. The king responds:

"Why do you bend such solemn brows on me?
Think you I bear the shears of destiny?
Have I commandment on the pulse of life?"

Once again, the King's powers are demarcated. The king, by his own admission, doesn't command the pulse of life. He can't determine destiny. And yet the King is directly responsible for Arthur's death, giving further indication of his illegitimacy. The king can kill, though it isn't a legitimate power, but, as John learns later in the scene when he learns of his mother's death, he cannot bear the shears of destiny. He cannot keep either his mother or the kingdom she seized for him alive.

For me, the larger question isn't whether the Fed should try to stave off a recession. As I said, recessions are inevitable in the market economy, in the same way that storms are inevitable and in the same way that deaths are inevitable, even the deaths of empires. Not only is the financial system of the American empire unstable and ripe for death, but the entire empire, an empire dependent on infinite growth in a world of finite resources, is long overdue, as well. It's time has come. The longer we prop it up with illegitimate power, the harder the ultimate crash will be and the more people will suffer. I say we let it die now. Use the financial crisis as an opportunity, an opportunity to die and be reborn--to reinstate the rightful king, which is none other than the natural world on which we're all dependent and a part of. Don't re-inflate the economic bubble or the empire bubble. Just pop it. Let the clouds over-saturate and tilt your face up to greet the rain. Messenger, pour down thy weather!

hudson
counterpunch
alternet

Honduras Thoughts and Highlights

I’m still in the process of defining my trip, but, for now, here are a few memories:

Copan

A small town, heavy on tourism, built next to an ancient Mayan city. The temples there aren’t as large or as numerous as those in Tikal, where I visited last year, but the architecture and the presentation of the sight are more interesting in Copan. Another thing I liked better about Copan is that they don’t try very hard to sell you on the idea that you're in a spiritual place. The tourist information is more honest: You are standing on ground that was once decimated by the ancient Mayan life-style—and the Mayans paid a heavy price for their irresponsibility. By not taking care of the land that took care of them, they were nearly wiped out—and the jungle they took for granted reclaimed their temples and their homes for itself, tree roots embedded firmly into the mortar they used for construction and the forest terrain burying every inch of their once proud and highly developed civilization.

Copan doesn't bear witness to the greatness of a civilization but to the greatness of the jungle.

The town itself, though a little too touristy for my taste, grew on me in spite of the numerous difficulties I had while there, difficulties which included stomach trouble and a major hassle trying to obtain money after losing my debit card. What made the visit worthwhile was my homestay. My host mother was so generous and trusting that she offered to let me use her credit card for the duration of my trip and bring it back when I was finished. She wrote down her pin number for me. And the two young boys were a hoot. The oldest surprised me with a big hug after coming home from my first day of Spanish classes (I had known him for a day), and the youngest would shout my name all day long. One day he was playing with a sword, and I asked him in Spanish “What’s that?” He thought for a second, put the sword between his legs and said, “Un Caballo.” A horse. It was cute. I’ll miss them.

La Ceiba

The Night Club.

I’ve been in packed houses before, but nothing like this. You could barely move and there was no AC. Still, it was fun. I danced most of the night with a local woman named Carla. I think my Spanish must be getting a bit better, because I met and befriended a lot of locals on this trip.

Los Ex-Patriates

The owner of the Ex-Patriates bar is a 50 – 65 year old gringo who, though he’s lived in Honduras for ten years now, speaks at best maybe ten words of Spanish. One night he was there at the bar with a gorgeous 20 year old Honduran woman trying to explain the Fourth of July fireworks: “It’s like … boom. Like … like Feliz Navidad.” Apparently they light fireworks at Christmas time in Honduras. Amazingly, the woman seemed to, or pretended to, understand everything he said.

The same night another old gringo walked in, this one also with a gorgeous younger woman, only, in this case, the woman looked like a prostitute. I was talking to the bartender when the gringo walked up, or strutted up to us, said: “I’m so-and-so from the Caribbean. I’m here with my la-dy” He stood up tall and proud as he said it, then slammed 500 limps on the bar. “Pay it!” He then walked back to his extremely unhappy-looking “la-dy” as the bartender and I rolled our eyes at each other. Real life can parody itself better than any fiction.

Cayos Cochinos

Just before leaving La Ceiba, I paid eighty bucks—a fortune in Honduras—to spend the night on my own private island along the corral reef. Actually, I wasn’t alone. I was with four young ladies from Britain and Holland. Even better. We made a little camp fire on the beach and talked late into the night, but the best part of the stay, and what made it worth the eighty bucks, was the snorkeling. Snorkeling along the corral reef is like seeing the Grand Canyon underwater, only with more colors and with live animals who swim alongside you and occasionally turn to stare you straight in the face. It was quite literally like passing into another world.

Trujillo

The most beautiful town I stayed in, if you don’t count the jungle. It’s flanked by an impressive forest-covered mountain on one side and the beach on the other. By all rights, it should be a tourist mecca, but the locals are a bit too laid back to make it happen. The Cruise Ship Industry offered to make Trujillo a stop on their tours if the town built a port and improved the sewer system, for which the Cruise Industry provided the money. The money, though, was quickly laundered away and so Trujillo remains the same sleepy laid back town it’s been, apparently, for quite some time.

La Casa Kiwi

The hostel I stayed in the first three nights in Trujillo. I was able to do some more snorkeling there. We weren’t directly on the reef, so the snorkeling wasn’t as awe-inspiring, but I was able to swim out to an old shipwreck site, where I jumped over the side and swam around inside the hull, watching schools of fish go in and out of the hatches. Among the fish I saw were barricudas, jellyfish, and stingrays.

Casa Kiwi is a bit remote, so at night I would congregate in the hotel bar with the owner and the other five guests to drink and play pool. Nothing else I could do, and nothing else I really wanted to do.

My Morning Routine

I fell into a nice little routine in Trujillo, which started with coffee and an ice cream at a downtown hotel. The coffee in Honduras sucks. You wouldn’t think so, since you’re surrounded by coffee plantations, but they make it super strong and without any flavoring save a half a cup or so of sugar. What did taste good, though, was the coffee-flavored ice cream they sold next to the hotel. So I took to buying a cup of coffee which I would mix with my ice cream to improve the flavor. After finishing my coffee and my writing, I would go down to the beach and drink dollar mimosas while swimming and reading the newspaper. Not a bad way to start the day.

Raw Sewage

It was in Trujillo that, thanks to the knowledge of some Peace Corps volunteers, I learned that the strange looking mud I sometimes had to pass through in my sandals was exactly what I thought it was.

Olancho (the so-called ‘Wild East’ of Honduras)

I arrived in a little town called Catacama, the second largest town in Olancho but not very large, with maybe a thousand inhabitants and absolutely no tourists. I showed up at one of the two hotels in town and, after hearing the price for a single bed, asked the old woman who I presumed was the owner whether I could have a look at the room—which was about five feet away and already open. “No,” she said, without explanation. Eventually, after a few more pleas, she consented, and the room turned out to be great—probably the best I stayed in my entire trip. I think I was the only guest, too. I wonder why.

They have some caves outside town that were discovered in 1996. Inside the caves are two chambers full of bones, which, due to the calcite, glow in the dark. The bones were analyzed and dated back to 1500 BC. Unfortunately, though, as I didn’t find out until I got there, the bones are closed off to the public and all you can see are replicas in the museum. Still, I had a pleasant adventure hitch-hiking my way to the site.

The Howler Monkeys

I met a guy who owns a large farm outside of town, which he agreed to take me to visit. While there, I got to actually climb around with the dozens of howler monkeys who live there in the trees by the river. It was amazing. Afterwards, on horseback, we followed a school of parrots to the edge of the property.

The next day, when the same guy gave me a ride to the base of the mountain where I’d be hiking into the jungle, he was sure that the most memorable part of my visit to his farm was feeding cookies to the cows.

Hiking in the Rain Forest

My travel book said that I might be able to find a guide by inquiring at the town information office, but the office was closed and would remain so for several days, so, instead, a local fixed me up with a friend of his and I paid way more than I should have for what turned out to be a less than qualified hiking guide.

The first day, after getting a late start, we hiked to a house in the mountains, not too far out of civilization, where my guide had some relatives. Jose, my guide, didn’t tell me much about the rain forest along the way, but he told me an awful lot about himself, including his secret for staying young and fit, which was to conserve his sperm. Only once every eleven days, he told me, and only with one woman (a comment he later had to amend after confessing to a long affair with a woman half his age). He also claimed to be a Shaman, one whose powers came from Jesus Christ and the Catholic Church, and an “hombre muy raro” who didn’t care about money. When I suggested that he prove his exceptionality by providing me his services for free or at a discount, he quickly changed the subject. “I’ve fathered twenty one kids,” he told me.

There was a moment after we arrived at the house that I’ll never forget. I was sitting on the house patio, tired but endorphin-drunk from the day’s hike, watching and listening to these two older guys in Cowboy hats as they sipped coffee and talked politics. A candle against the wall behind them lit their backsides but left their fronts in dark silhouette. Further out: a night sky covered in stars, as many as I have ever seen, and a forest full of fireflies.

The next day we took mules until we arrived near the peak of the mountain, just before the trail ended. Jose said that we had to leave the mules with the boy who had accompanied us for that day’s leg of the journey, because the upcoming part of the forest was sacred,. We were in the heart of the jungle now, and mules were not allowed. I wanted to believe that it had something to do with a prohibition of one animal making the other into a beast of burden, so to speak, but Jose didn’t accept my romantic Westernized explanation. He said that the mules might eat part of the forest, something all animals in the forest do, and something far less damaging, it seemed to me, than hacking the forest with a machete as my guide was prone to do throughout our hike. Still, after hearing a bit more about the rare and exceptional qualities of my Shaman guide Jose, we continued our journey, arriving about an hour later at a small hut which Jose claimed to own. What he didn’t own, though, was a key to the lock on the door, so he chopped the door down to get us inside. We spent the night there, in a cloud of smoke that Jose created to keep the mosquitoes out.

Next day, we headed into the thick of the jungle. The trail had ended, so we had to machete-cut our own path, moving about a hundred feet every thirty minutes. We were trying to make our way to a cave that was less than three hundred feet from our campsite, but we never made it. Jose explained the failure by claiming that the caves probably didn’t want to be found, no doubt because of my gringo unworthiness, and instead we headed for the peak of La Picucha, the highest point in Olancho. Five or six times, Jose stopped, looking confused. “I have to concentrate for a minute,” he would say. “I need to think.” Believe me, the jungle is no place to get lost. Unlike wilderness areas in the States, the Jungles are so thick and so wet and slippery that being even a few hundred feet off course could be disastrous. So I was getting worried. We had hiked for over seven hours, our sleeping supplies were back at the base camp, and it was getting dark. Jose clearly was a little concerned as well, so we turned around, the peak no where in sight, and started to make our way back. Whether it was dumb luck or the fact that my guide knew the forest a little better than I thought, we did, in less than two hours, find our way back to the base-camp, where we settled in for a much deserved rest.

Jose had promised to take me at least to the caves the following day, but, when dawn broke, he announced that we were heading back. Though I hadn’t got to see either of the two things I had paid him to show me—the caves and the peak—I didn’t complain. I was ready to leave.

Going down was much faster, but, due to the slipperiness and the pounding on the knees, much more difficult. Plus, it didn’t help that I fell into the river trying to jump from one rock to another to avoid getting my feet wet.

After we got back into town, Jose announced that I owed another five hundred limps, about 25 dollars. Apparently, to him, a day occurred with each sunrise rather than a twenty four hour period. I told him I wouldn’t pay, especially since I hadn’t seen anything he had promised to show me and I was paying way more than the going rate to begin with. Unfortunately, though, my hiking boots, which I had traded for waders after falling into the river, were in his bag. So I wound up paying twenty five extra dollars to get my shoes back.

Tegucigalpa and San Pedro Sula

Didn’t spend much time in either place. They’re both big cities, and, since I live in a big city, I prefer to vacation in smaller towns and the countryside. Still, I was surprised, as I was throughout Honduras, at how friendly the people were. Once, for example, in Trujillo, I came upon three guys smoking pot on the beach, and I asked them if they knew where the Spanish School was. Long pause. After a minute or two, an old guy of about fifty years of age, slowly rose up, shook off his pot-induced ease, and proceeded to walk me five blocks to where he thought the school was. When that wasn’t it, he walked me another four blocks to another destination, failing again. So he then called a friend who gave me directions (which turned out to be wrong, but still…). This kind of thing happened on a daily basis, even in the big cities.

Traveling always makes me more aware of my mortality, but especially so in Honduras. My last night in San Pedro Sula, or in Honduras for that matter, I saw a dead body on television. The dead man had been hit in the head, and half of his face had swollen up like a balloon, and flies swarmed around the bluish-colored, water-soaked flesh of his body. This kind of imagery isn’t unusual in Honduras. It’s ubiquitous. Earlier that day, on the front page of the newspaper, I had seen the photo of a nine-year old girl who had been killed in an auto accident. Her face was shown buried in a mound of mud and grass that must have been pushed up by the impact of her body. The mangled wreckage is right behind her and beyond that a crowd of onlookers and police.

One night I woke up from a dream in which my family had, for some reason, traveled to a foreign country for a loved one’s funeral and I had wandered off to mourn in private. The dream itself isn’t really that significant. But it evoked in me a feeling of sadness like I have never experienced in my life. And it wasn’t a sadness that could be satisfied, either. It was something intrinsic to life. Not something that made life into a tragedy but a profound and inescapable sadness nonetheless. I could not cry hard enough to express it. Even now, I can’t shake it. Honduras has changed me.

Gone Traveling

I had planned on posting something before I left, but the departure date kinda snuck up on me (I leave on Thur. morning). I wanted to write something about either how nature, historically, has been mis-defined or about what elements of civilization and the "civilized mind" ought to be preserved--but I won't have time.

I'll be traveling until August, when I have to be back for the new semester. Hopefully, I'll have plenty to write about when I get back--if I have time, that is.

Have a great summer y'all!!!

The Moon and Zapatista

In the moon’s light is a nudity

That wants to be looked upon.

And in the brightness reflected upon your adoring eyes

You see a world un-darkened

And un-envious.

As to an oracle, you cry out to her

And she prophecies through the falling leaves:

“You are now the shadow of an earth

That in dreams alone can still be seen

Through a tired gaze, as dancing shapes in the dust.

You, a shadow, will see but not become the light.

You will walk and fight with no air in your lungs,

With those whose voices are unheard except as faded echoes.

You will find no shelter, no repose, no grace.

You may find one to love, and your heart

Will talk through your mouth

Each time you say “I love you”.

But you, a shadow, will never find the lips

That will say “you”, “It is you.”

You will search and you will fight

As the din of your quiescent hopes

Until the night and your shadow are one,

Until you are no more even a shadow.

You, among the dead of always,

Will die once again,

This time that you might know

What it means to live.”

***

"We are Mexican, mostly indigenous, and we took up arms on January 1 of 1994 demanding a voice, face and name for the forgotten of the earth.”

“We want a world where many worlds are possible.”

--Subcomandante Marcos

Overpopulation

According to psychologist Theodor Reich, masochism is not actually an enjoyment of pain, but a way to gain control over pain. In other words, a human being sees a painful occurrence as inevitable. There is no way she can avoid it. She feels helpless. So, in order to gain a degree of control over the situation, she connives to bring the pain on herself, which promotes the false idea that she actually enjoys pain—that she desires suffering—that she wants to be hurt. By and by she becomes unable to experience pleasure. She learns to delay gratification, and, in doing so, feels a stronger sense of self-mastery. She becomes stoic and disciplined. Although she takes no joy in it, and although she intends only to decrease her sense of impotence, she begins to destroy everything around her—not out of hatred or pride or greed, but unconsciously—as an effort to lessen her feeling of helplessness and to escape her inevitable victimization.

Now, I’m not really into sado-masochism (a million other kinky things, but not that), but, explained as it is above, I can understand its appeal. I can understand how easily a person’s desires can be changed, how easily a person can be convinced to take pleasure in something that actually causes physical pain and harm. It’s easier to cope with an imposition, after all, if you can convince yourself that the imposition isn’t an imposition—that it’s what you really want. In fact, it’s exactly this human ability to delude ourselves that makes our current capitalistic system possible.

As explained by Slavoj Zizek, capitalistic society is more effective than socialism because it adds an extra layer of injunction. Socialism tells you that you have to stop playing with your friends and go visit your grandmother, whom you don’t like, because you’ll be in trouble if you don’t. Capitalism still demands that you visit your grandmother, but it tells you so in a different way. “No,” says the capitalistic parent, “you don’t have to visit your grandmother. You can be selfish, if that’s what you really want. I thought you were better than that, but, well, if that’s what you want…. You can stay here and play with your friends and let your family down. That’s your decision. We don’t mind. If you don’t want to be with your family who loves you…. I mean, maybe you’re not the caring, loving child we thought you were. What kind of person doesn’t love their grandma and enjoy visiting her? I don’t know. Maybe you’re a little less considerate and colder than we thought. That’s too bad. But, you know, don’t worry about it. You do whatever you want to do. It’s your decision.”

And, of course, the Capitalistic child isn’t stupid. He knows what he just heard: “You not only have to go visit your grandmother. You have to LIKE IT!”

And if a child learns how to obey the second injunction, to “like it”, he doesn’t have to obey the first injunction, or, more importantly, to even acknowledge that an injunction exists. If I’m able to convince myself that I like being a slave, then I’ll probably have an easier time dealing with my enslavement. Because I won't have to even acknowledge that I'm following orders, I’ll have a better, healthier life on the plantation—but I’ll also be more likely to remain a slave. And as long as my enslavement continues, thanks to the omnipresent human incentive to make the best of a bad situation, I can never completely trust myself or my desires, even when the desire is one as seemingly natural as having kids.

For most of my life I wanted to be a father, and a part of me still does. When I tell people that I don’t want to have kids, I don’t really mean that I don’t “want” kids, what I mean is that I’ve made a decision not to have kids because I don’t think it’s a socially responsible choice. There are too many humans on the planet, and I don’t want to add to the problem—so, to honor the landbase, I’ve repressed my desires and decided to remain childless.

Still, when I watch a movie about a father bonding with his son or daughter, when I see men my age come alive as they re-live their childhoods through their offspring, when I realize how much of a minority I am because I’m not a father, when I realize there might not be anyone around to take care of me as I get older, when I listen to fathers talk with pride and selfless love about their kids, when I see assholes turn into caring and mature human beings after becoming fathers, I start to feel regretful, even scared, and I wonder if I’m making the right choice.

That’s why it’s easy for me not to get preachy about the issue of overpopulation. Not only do I sometimes question my present beliefs about my personal responsibility in curtailing the problem, but I understand why people have kids in spite of world overpopulation. I understand the desire. Plus, I’d be a hypocrite to condemn others for having kids, because I haven’t always felt the way I do now. When I was married, my wife and I talked about and agreed to start a family but then divorced before we could follow through on our plans. Even then, I knew overpopulation was a tremendous problem in the world, but I had no intention to help remedy the matter by remaining childless. Back then, I didn’t really feel like I had other choices. Simultaneously, I didn’t really feel any sense of responsibility for the choice I had made about starting a family.

But I’ve changed. And the most obvious difference between then and now is that I’m not married. As a practical matter, I can’t have children, or at least not without huge negative complications. And I make no secret about the fact that my current views evolved as a direct result of my divorce. Put frankly, deciding that I didn’t want kids, or, more to the point, that I didn’t desire to be father, helped me cope with the fact that I couldn’t have kids—and, for a while, I was in denial about my true feelings. But I’m not anymore. I now fully acknowledge that I want children—I want to be a father—but I’m also firm in my decision to remain childless—in my decision to repress that desire.

In other words, I no longer use my beliefs about needing to neutralize the problem of overpopulation as a mask for my impaired ability to have children. I don’t have to cover up my desire anymore to cope with my disappointment. At the same time, my disappointment isn’t what it used to be. More to the point, my desire to be a father is now outweighed by my desire to act on my beliefs about ecological responsibility. The latter desire, I now believe, will lead to more happiness than the former. Like I said, I’ve changed. And in addition to not being married, I’m now in an environment where I don’t feel like I need to be married to fit in. That makes a huge difference. If I still lived in Utah, where I grew up, I would not have remained single for as long as I have—and I definitely would have had children by now—because I wouldn’t know of any other appealing options. My choices would be narrowed, and I would not be able to imagine a happy bachelor’s life nor would I be as aware of the problem of overpopulation as I am now, if I still lived in the area where I grew up. Even to this day, when I go back home to visit, I’m made to feel like a failure because I haven’t started a family and because I’m well passed the age in which you’re supposed to start a family. Let’s face it, getting married and having kids is part of our culture’s recommended story—a rite of passage for all respectable citizens, an initiation test. And if you don’t live up to those expectations, you are considered a failure. While the injunction to have kids is stronger in Utah than it is Colorado, the injunction still, indisputably, exists.

And most likely for that reason, though it’s less powerful, I still have some desire to be a father. The fact that I now have more and better options for being creative has lessened my desire but it hasn’t killed it. Unlike when I was planning a family, though, I no longer trust my desires. Just “wanting” children isn’t enough. I’m now convinced that my desire to have kids isn’t really a desire; it’s an order. And because of that awareness, it’s easier to repress the pseudo desire. And I couldn’t have that awareness if I didn’t live within an environment that shows very concretely that fatherhood isn’t necessary for personal fulfillment—if I didn’t live in an environment where I can safely question and distrust my desires, and, in turn, become better acquainted with my passions and their sources.

Put another way, my desire to have kids, as well as my current desire not to have them, is a social not a biological urge. I’m not biologically predetermined to want children. And that isn’t only true for myself and other men; it’s true for women, as well. I grant that we might have a biological urge to create and nourish our species and our bloodlines, but, to me, that doesn’t translate into a biological urge to procreate. If you put a dozen worms in a jar and then reduce their food supply, the worms will stop procreating. The worms’ behavior seems to suggest that preserving the land base and thereby respecting carrying capacity, overrides the urge, if it exists, to have baby worms. And, as writer Derrick Jensen joked during a recent lecture I attended, “worms don’t even have brains!” Worms, because they can’t rationalize, can’t be manipulated with thought the way humans can and, consequently, can’t be misled about their desires and urges. They act on instinct, and instinct tells them to stop having baby worms when there isn’t enough food to go around. It says that quality of life, not just quantity, matters. It says that you have to involve yourself in your surroundings, respecting the needs of the land’s other inhabitants—that your self and your species and your bloodline extend to your entire environment and not to certain narrow and clearly delineated boundaries. It says that, for worms, respecting the ‘other’ is the most efficient way to ensure a certain quality of life for the ‘self’.

No doubt, in my mind, that in our present situation we would act the same way as the worms in the bottle if we weren’t following orders—if we were more receptive to our passions than to our duties. That isn’t difficult to prove, either. Look anywhere in the world where women’s rights are increasing, where women can more honestly and more effectively assess their human needs, and the birth rate is in decline. But in places where women, the primary victims of globalization-induced poverty and nearly all human rights abuse, have fewer rights, the birth rates are exploding. In the non-industrialized parts of the world that are being used mainly as fodder for western enterprise, where modern power is most evident—in parts of Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa—and in places where the culture publicly endorses the subjugation of women (not coincidentally the same regions)—the birth rates are growing exponentially, while in Europe and America, places where feminism has at least taken root and is at least given voice to and where power is more diffused, the birth rates are not sufficient to maintain current population levels. And it’s only within minority western communities—the Black and Hispanic communities in America and immigrant populations of Europe, within communities where, because of economic disadvantages, members have fewer opportunities and subsequently fewer freedoms—that birth rates continue to rise.

Put simply, the more enslaved within our current system a person finds herself, the more likely she is to have children. And it’s easy to understand why. If you’re born into a certain level of enslavement, you have little control over your actions. You have little say in how you define yourself as a person. You don’t have the right of self-determination, and, as a result, you become defined by your masters—by male masters, mostly, who offer you only the roles that serve their interests—the roles of daughter, wife, and mother. The reason that the US and other developed nations haven’t sufficiently supported Third World family planning programs and the reason that many non-industrialized nations don’t see overpopulation as a problem is obvious: it’s because you can’t solve the population problem without solving the problems of misogyny and oppression, two elements required by the dominant culture to function. If you give women more options, options that don’t support the power structure, and if you give men more options than the ones in which they dominate women (and support the power structure), you weaken the hierarchical and oppression-based system that rules us. You weaken patriarchy. What world leaders implicitly realize but don’t allow into their consciences is that the problems related to overpopulation—concomitant problems of world hunger and poverty, for example—are primarily women’s issues. More broadly, as suggested by Riane Eisler, they’re issues that challenge the very foundations of the andocratic/dominator system that all nations on the planet currently practice. If you advance the rights and choices of women, if women come to be known as more than just breeders, we will no longer need society as we know it. The system would collapse, because giving in to women means giving in to the very thing that modern society is trying to rise above—nature.

So, we cope as best we can. By accepting traditional roles, by convincing ourselves that those are the roles we most want to adopt, we cope better with our subservience. We learn to like it. That isn’t to say that the desire to be a mother or father isn’t real, only that it’s a manufactured desire. It isn’t pre-determined. Nor am I suggesting that the desire to be a father or mother is intrinsically unhealthy. Under certain circumstances, the desire might be created by forces other than coercion and will complement the needs of the environment. In the present-day world, though, the human desire to have children is destructive and, I believe, a-natural. It decreases what I believe all living things most desire—freedom.

That doesn’t mean, however, that we blame those with the desire, on the slaves making the best of their enslavement. To solve the population problem, we shouldn’t add on more layers of injunction. We shouldn’t, like China, start passing laws to prohibit having too many children and thereby increase current levels of servitude. Nor, as we do in America, should we do more to enable people’s desires, desires that simply serve the status quo and not the individual. Instead, we need to challenge and re-think our desires, which isn’t possible so long as we remain in positions of confinement. To solve the population problem we need to create new desires and new opportunities. More precisely, we need more not less freedom. We need to give people the world over the right to self-determination, the right to create their own stories and their own self-definitions, and not force people to adopt a way of life that gives one a choice between awareness and misery or false-happiness and increased enslavement. Barring that, barring a complete change in and destruction of our current dominator-based way of life, we can at least show people, ourselves included, that slavery isn’t inevitable; it isn’t biologically pre-determined. As artists or spokespersons, we can give others a glimpse of alternative fulfilling lifestyles—create even an artificial view of life that exposes people’s current desires as the social creations they are and which points the way to other realities, to epistemologies that favor opening of the self and not constriction; if we can’t literally expand people’s freedoms, we can expand their imaginations and thereby make it easier to acknowledge and resist our confinement. In a phrase, we can provide people with new visions and new insights—to allow both sexes a means for achieving personal fulfillment—for being creative—other than having kids.

***

Civilization is advancing not so much on the back of humanity, but, eerily enough, without it.

Murray Bookchin

***

Riane Eisler The Chalice and The Blade; Slavoj Zizek Zizek!; Philip K. Dick Valis; Murray Bookchin The Freedom of Ecology

Days When I Can't Stop Weeping

When I haven’t slept well the night before, I tend to get emotional over almost anything. I heard a song and wept once in the car on the way up to the mountain. I wept twice more while skiing: once on the lift when I saw a blackbird playing in the wind and again on my final run of the day.

At Keystone they have two very long mogul runs. I can arrive at the mountain by noon or even one o’ clock and take those two runs the rest of the day and come home completely exhausted, as if I had skied from early morning until midnight.

Today, I skied extra hard, but, in spite of the fatigue, I was having a good day. I was so in the zone during my last run that I decided not to stop and rest a quarter of the way down as I normally do, and I kept going until I reached the midway curve. Catching my breath, I sat down in the snow and waited for my heart rate to calm. When it did, I was able to focus on the view: a clear sky and miles and miles and miles of mountain and snow-frosted pines. It looked like mercy.

Postscript

Okay, here's the point, or part of the point: on the surface, it might seem as if the conclusions reached by the Minotaur's justice system are a bit crazy--and they are, except for one thing--to any careful and rational thinking reader, they're not. By the standards of conventional logic, the argument made by the Official Prosecutor is both sound and valid. In other words, the premises of his case (that you can't exist if you don't have a mother, that you can't create or give birth to something already in existence, etc.) are nearly beyond question. They are, by almost any rational account, true. And what's more, the conclusion he reaches is perfectly valid; it contains all of the premises. In other words, the premises are true and the conclusion, because it is valid, is also true. By the standards of formal logic, you can't argue with the Official Prosecutor's pronouncement that Mrs. Anderson doesn't exist. In additon, the Official Prosecutor's argument isn't limited only to the circumstances of the skit; you could apply the same deductive reasoning to yourself and reach the exact same conclusion: logically, you don't exist. (you can find the basis of the argument repeated here: nagarjuna).

And yet you do exist--I think. Logic, in this case, seems to go against what observation and ordinary sense tell us is factual. So does that mean that either logic or our observations are lying to us?

In a word, no. All it means is that the tool, logic, can't be effectively used in this instance. By the same account, addition is a great tool for determining how many chips you'll have after you win a big poker pot, but it won't be of much use in collecting rain drops. Two rain drops plus two more doesn't equal four raindrops; it equals a larger puddle. Observation, likewise, is a great tool for certain situations--such as assessing whether the current weather is suitable for a picnic--but it isn't very good, without the help of certain technologies, for determining the shape of the earth.

Even more to the point, logic didn't really fail in this case; language did. Language is simply too inaccurate to serve as a flattering vehicle for logical analysis. And that brings me to my thesis: language doesn't just express knowledge, it also inhibits knowledge. The key is to make language serve you rather than the other way around. The key is to make sure that you aren't becoming an addict. A drug used properly can cure you of a disease or even open you up to new creative insights, but once the drug starts to use you, once you become dependent, once you can't function without getting your fix, then the drug becomes a disease rather than a cure and it closes you off from, rather than exposes you to, new creative manifestations.

And in a world of addicts and pushers, somebody, a postmodernist writer, for example, has to be a voice of reason and reveal the modern drug-of-choice for what it is--a tool that is being misused and overly relied on. She has to demonstrate the limits and the drawbacks of the drug, which is exactly what certain post modern writers are trying to do with language; they're trying to prevent language from using you instead of the reverse. By exposing the failings of language, the postmodern writer isn't muddling the truth and she isn't doing scientists a dis-service, she's helping scientists and all other seekers of knowledge to see things more clearly and from less restricted perspectives. She's doing an intervention.

And while most scientists understand this, there are certain pseudo-scientists, Richard Dawkins foremost among them, who feel threatened by imprecise and creative uses of language because they're seeking a unifying singularity rather than knowledge; they're seeking confirmation for their own brand of fundamentalism, which they spread through the church of reductionist science. Like the Catholic missionaries of yesterday, the prophets of reductionism are hell-bent on spreading their gospel to anyone who will listen, or be forced to listen, and it isn't truth that matters to them, but ideology, an ideology that anyone can receive if he just opens up his veins, sticks the needle in, and gets carried away by the sense of certainty and cohesion.

The reductionists don't use Science as a tool; Science uses the reductionist to filter out knowledge that it doesn't like--as a means of minimizing what can be known so that everything supports a particular ideology. It's not surprising then that a reductionist would want to do the same thing with language that she has done with Science. Instead of seeing language's limitations and using it only in the limited circumstances in which it's feasible, and instead of trying to re-vision language to make it less able to undermine the truths of experience, the reductionist strives to purify language as a scientific instrument by putting its limitations onto the actual world--to make the world fit the language (and the Science) instead of vice versa.

Properly and narrowly applied, science, like language, can be a useful tool. I'm not questioning that. But I am questioning the value we place on scientific knowledge. It seems to me that by failing to acknowledge the limitations of science, we run the risk of defining science as a dogma rather than as a tool--we're setting it up to be our master, a master that we've managed to codify and embody in words. But words can't be mistaken for the things they represent. The moon is not the same as the finger that points at the moon, and scientific knowledge, which must be expressed through language, either the language of words or of logic and mathematics, is not the same as the truth it attempts to express. This, I believe, is what many post modernist writers are trying to make evident. So, while in certain circumstances, despite its limitations, I might find scientific knowledge extremely useful, even to the point of delegating to it my own less-informed judgment, I don't trust it as my master, and neither should anyone else. If either science or post-modern philosophy tells me, for example, that I don't exist, I'm not going to trust it, no matter how impeccable and accredited the reasoning and no matter how insistent others are that I use no other tool to make a verification.

Here's an article that further details the flaws in reductionist thinking:
Darwinian Fundamentalism