Taksim Istanbul and Iznik

This is the trendier, much more expensive and touristy part of Istanbul. It's a great area for nightlife and shopping, but not too interesting beyond that. We're paying a lot more here, for a not so nice apartment and  inferior food quality. It's still nothing compared to what we'll pay in Paris, though.

A few highlights:
Topkapi palace. A bit of a disappointment. The riches exhibited in the treasury were stunning--if you're into that sort of thing. And the relics--John the Babtist's severed arm, Mohammed's sword, a lock of Abraham's hair--might be interesting to gullible religious people--but I was there for the sense of history, of which there wasn't much. The library would have been a wonderfully pleasant place for an afternoon read, equally good for a siesta thereafter. And the bedroom, the bed in particular, would have been great for a good night's sleep or, due to its size, a wild orgy with your harem.

Fatih Mosque, the largest in Istanbul, where we lounged on the carpet for an hour or so and then wandered the area. We returned to Taksim and saw the Galata tower, where they wanted twelve Lira (six dollars) to take an elevator to the top. We decided that if we really wanted a good view, we'd take the elevator to the top of a nearby high-rise hotel or climb a neaby hill (one tourist thing I'll never get is the mania for paying large sums of money to climb or be taken to the top of something). We ended up doing neither and watched a Japanese drum concert at the base of the tower.

Pera Museum. They had an exhibition of Goya's prints. I think I like his prints better than his paintings, and I love the paintings, the latter one's anyway, the ones he wasn't paid for. He reminds me a little of a more modern Brughel, depicting everyday life as both trivial and fantastically mysterious at once. I was already aware of his talent for revealing the absurdity and tragedy of things, but the prints show a more concise satire than I've seen in the paintings. One print shows a donkey carrying a corpse and is titled "Curious Devotion". Below that is a man carrying a statue and is titled: "Even moreso".

The permanent exhibits were so so. Well worth the visit, though, for the Goya prints (and a few paintings, all portraits).

The Cisterns. Built in 1453 to hold the city's water. Mostly drained, it looks today like an underground cathedral (pics to come). Two pillars at the end are constructed with the remains of two roman statues of Medusa, the faces turned upside down to prevent gazers from turning to stone.

We attended a Spanish language couchsurfing event after that. There were around 60 people there. Big and active couchsurfing community here in Istanbul. This is our third couchsurfing event, all of them well-attended.

Chora Church. Arguably the best place in the world to see Byzantine art, especially of the so-called Byzantine Renaissance (the later period). Aside from straining our neck muscles gazing upward at the ceilings, it was pretty nice. The mosaics depicting the life of Mary, scenes from the Apocrypha, were particularly interesting, the only depictions of their kind. Like Hagia Sofia, it isn't much to look at from outside, but inside is quite stunning. The mosaics are fairly well-preserved, considering their age (10th to 12th century), and the frescos in the tomb room even moreso. The Byzantines didn't build their churches symmetrically, like the Catholics, giving their structures a more dynamic and natural appearance.

On the way there, I stopped to ask two hijab-clad women for directions. Both tilted their chins up high and ignored me. I'm guessing that for some Muslim women it isn't proper to talk to male strangers.

Archeology Museum. Excellent. Oldest stuff I've ever seen. They've got something from every early civilization you can think of, at least in Mesopotamia.

Boat tour. We took a self-guided ferry tour up the Bosphorus to the mouth of the Black Sea. At the end, there's a small fishing village, overlooked by the ruins of a castle. Beautiful. We saw a pack of dolphins, too. There's something exhilirating about seeing even a small speck of fin amid all that blue emptiness.

Iznik.

Formerly Nicaea, where the Nicene Creed originated. A wonderful, quiet little town about two hours from Istanbul. We had a hotel that overlooked the lake, where we spent a fair amount of time drinking sangria and watching the sunset. The people there were as friendly as they were in the first neighborhood we visited in Istanbul. Strangers stopped to invite us to tea, a vendor gave us a free watermelon just for asking about prices, and everyone seemed happy to give us directions.

One day we saw a young boy yelling at his three  sisters. When they returned to where he was screaming, he punched the oldest, a girl of maybe thirteen, in the side.

Last days. We couchsurfed with another super friendly local named Daliver. He left us alone in his apartment for the night, took us out to dinner twice, drove us around the city, and took us the next morning to the airport. After all this, he apologized for not having time to show us more.

Sad to leave. I definitely hope to return.

Travels

Madrid

We spent most of our holiday vacation here, so there isn't much touristy stuff left for us to do. Mostly we just settled into our apartment and dealt with the jet lag (strangely, Jesusa, who has been living here for over seven months, is struggling with it almost as much as I am), falling asleep between 2 and 4 am (though we get in bed at 12) and sleeping until 11 or 12 the next day, when we wake for breakfast. After breakfast, I go out to my favorite cafe to do a little writing and reading over a cup of Americano and a sugary pastry. Then it's back to the apartment for a bit of not-at-all-earned R and R. At about 4:30, we head out for lunch. A long walk to some part of the city thereafter and then out for some tapeando (tapas + ing). We went out with some of Jesusa's Colombian friends one night, a group of Couchsurfers another, and, on my birthday, went to Carmen, a Flamenco show, and to a nice restaurant after. Lots of good wine and good food. I'll have more to say about the beauties of Flamenco when we get back to Spain.

Istanbul

Woken up by the call to prayer. It moves me every time I hear it, makes me suddenly solemn, regardless of what I'm doing.

We didn't do much the first day. Took a walk and had lunch. The people are unbelievably friendly. We're staying near the airport, well outside of the tourist zones, and maybe for that reason the people here still find us exotic. And maybe they wouldn't be so friendly if I weren't with an attractive Colombian woman. When Jesusa left her sunglasses at the place we had lunch, two men from the kitchen chased us down about five blocks away in order to return them. After a coffee and tea, a man gave us a ride home because it was raining and we weren't dressed for it. The next day, at dinner, we ordered two durum from a small shop. The man brought us the durum and then a yogurt drink and two teas that we hadn't asked for. When we got up to pay and leave, he refused to take our money, which he did twice more on subsequent visits. We eventually learned to leave one or two things on our plates. If we didn't, he would bring us more food. He doesn't speak a word of English, but his unassuming smile and pleasant demeanor, even more generous than his actions, is something I hope stays with me.

Today we went to the Blue Mosque, which was quite impressive. In the tourist zones, most people speak English, unlike where we're staying, and they're still friendly though not quite as genuine, motivated more by the "plata" perhaps, than the people in the non-touristy areas.

When we got back to our place, the call to prayer chant started up again. It happens six times a day: twice in the early morning, again around noon, mid-afternoon, sunset (which, in the Muslim calendar marks the beginning of the new day, our morning), and evening.

At the Blue Mosque, they gave us a free informational seminar about the mosque and Muslim culture. While there's plenty to despise about the Muslim religion--most especially the militant permutations that have occurred in response to Colonialism and Globalization--there's much still to find appealing about the culture, perhaps the lone remaining contrast to western consumer lifestyles.

Dreams

I'm about to enter a Buddhist monastery as a monk. I'm uncertain about it, but a friend convinces me that it's "natural" and I join. Within the monastery, we hear a beautiful sound coming from outside. We go out to investigate and find one of the priests showing a number of other student monks a blank wall and, in song, describing the sounds made by the images on the wall. My friend rushes passed the wall and into the forest. I follow. I'm made to understand that the priest was playing a trick on everyone, reminding them that the finger that points to the moon should not be confused with the moon. The sound comes from the forest, not from the images or non-images on the wall or from the priest's singing.

I'm sure this has something to do with my admiration for the call to prayer.

In another dream, I'm about to meet a beautiful woman who is interested in me. Only I'm unable to have an intimate conversation with her due to my preoccupation with other smaller, more trivial conversations. I think this has something to do with the way Facebook, Twitter, etc. distract us from real human connection.

Istanbul Cont.

Saw Hagia Sofia finally. Breathtaking. Everything I anticipated. Later we saw a dance show--the whirling dervishes. They did a sama ceremony. It seemed weird to applaud what is meant to be an august and meditative spiritual ritual. But we did, along with all of the other smiling, dining tourists. It seemed even weirder to follow a religious ritual with a sexy belly dancer. But tourism comes before everything and maybe reduces everything to simulation. Or maybe not. If spiritual ecstasy can't express itself in the dance, maybe the dance, even when commodified, can create the ecstasy.

After the belly dancer, musicians came out to solicit money for the show we had already paid twenty dollars for.

Last day in our apartment near the airport, the less touristy, less western, part of the city. Hearing again the call to prayer echo off the rooftops I can see out our window.

St. Paul Principles and Occupy Denver

Respect for a Diversity of Tactics

While I don't believe in non-violence as an absolute moral principle, I still have a tremendous admiration for the work of Ghandhi, Martin Luther King, Caesar Chavez, and Marshall Rosenberg, and I share the belief of many Occupy Denver members about the need to promote non-violent resistance within our particular movement. And it's because I share the values of non-violence that I think it's absolutely essential that we commit to the St. Paul Principles, which, in my interpretation, not only aren't in contradiction to non-violent strategies but offer the only means of sincerely putting those strategies into action. The St. Paul Principles, as I interpret them, do not say that everyone has to agree with the actions of other people in the group; they don't say that you have to approve of actions you might define as violent. They merely state that “our solidarity will be based on respect for a diversity of tactics and the plans of other groups”, which is to say that you have every right to disagree with and even resist other people's actions as long as you don't do it through the use of force. You can gently try to discourage someone within our group to not use violence but you can't use violence or the threat of violence to ensure compliance. If someone throws a water bottle at police, you might, in the name of non-violence, respectfully express your disagreement with the person's actions or even stand in front of the police and take the hit yourself. The St Paul Principles say that you can do that. But you can't forcibly try to take the water bottle away, you can't wrestle the culprit to the ground and remove him or her from the situation, you can't verbally threaten the person with violent retaliatory action, and you can't turn him or her over to the police so that they can administer the violence you sought to avoid. The St. Paul Principles, in other words, allow people with different ideologies to remain in disagreement while simultaneously remaining in solidarity against corporate exploitation. Put another way, the St. Paul Principles allow us to use the same non-violent strategies within our group that non-violent advocates would like us to use in response to the forces of the corporate state. If we can ask that our members respond to the violence of the police with acts of non-violent resistance—that we respond respectfully to their disrespect—then we ought to insist that we treat acts of violence by our own comrades the same way. If we're asking our members to not dehumanize the police (the only group we can unanimously agree has acted violently), to not, as recommended by the Eight Rules of Non-Violence, see them as enemies but as potential recruits, and to not respond to their violence with violence of our own, then we ought to be able to respond to our own comrades, even when they disagree with us, with the same measure of respect and decency.

Not only that, but repealing the St. Paul Principles without a plan for enforcement won't actually accomplish anything besides a further division within our movement. Even if we repeal the St. Paul Principles, people are still going to act in ways that some people define as violent. People will show up on Saturdays who have never been to a General Assembly and who know nothing about its decisions, or who have been to GA but don't care about its decisions, or who have been to GA and care about abiding by its decisions but, in the heat of the moment, out of fear or anger, do something in violation of GA policy—people within the movement will still act in contradiction to GA decisions whether you endorse the St. Paul Principles or not. On the other hand, if we're serious about enforcing non-violence—if we're serious about policing ourselves in respect to the principles of non-violence, then, one, we have to be a much more organized and more hierarchical and more centralized entity than we currently are, and, two, we'll have to use force, violence and/or the threat of violence, to guarantee that everyone acts in accordance with our principles. And we'll then no longer be a non-violent movement. If you mean to take Ghandi's and MLK's ideas seriously and literally, and if you mean to model a real democratic community and process, then you can't use violence in the name of non-violence and you can't advocate top-down enforcement of General Assembly decisions. The danger here is in re-shaping the concepts of non-violence and democracy into commodity fetishes that are completely void of significant moral and practical meaning.

In my view, the St. Paul Principles offer a way out of the ethical conundrum. The issue of enforcement doesn't have to be altogether avoided, because a top-down, coercive, and centralized program of enforcement isn't the only option. We can enforce the majority of our primary values democratically, through social interaction, which is mainly what we've been doing and precisely what the St. Paul Principles encourage, but no set of principles, be they democratic or non-violent, can be expected to account for every situation we might encounter and to rule over our every behavior. Neither the St. Paul Principles or the principles of non-violence or democracy should be looked upon as absolute and infallible moral commands. Obviously, if a fellow protestor attempts to rape or murder another fellow protestor, then the St. Paul Principles as well as the principles of non-violence and democracy need to be overlooked in order to end the abuse as abruptly and efficiently as possible. The St. Paul Principles, or any principles, shouldn't be seen as mandates for behavior, nor were they intended as such. The St. Paul Principles specifically mean to challenge top-down decision-making and organizing and to empower everyone involved to take direct action in the world around them. They DO NOT advocate violence. True, they allow affinity groups to choose their own courses of action, but not without some form of consensus or direct democracy to decide on goals and tactics. The St. Paul Principles aren't dictates; they are guidelines, however, for continuing the discussion, for existing in unity and camaraderie with each other in spite of our ideological differences, and for allowing those of us who prize non-violence to continue to practice and promote our values without moral contradiction and without demonizing comrades who think and act differently, which isn't just a more honest and committed non-violent practice but also a much more effective strategy for convincing others to share our values. We need the St. Paul Principles, that is, to prevent the precise kinds of divisions we've seen from recent efforts to have the principles repealed.


St Paul Principles

1. our solidarity will be based on respect for a diversity of tactics and the plans of other groups.
2. the actions and tactics used will be organized to maintain a separation of time or space.
3. any debates or criticisms will stay internal to the movement, avoiding any public or media denunciations of fellow activists and events.
4. we oppose any state repression of dissent, including surveillance, infiltration, disruption and violence. we agree not to assist law enforcement actions against activists and others.

8 Rules of Non-Violence

1) Nonviolent action AND speech, no matter what. Zero tolerance for violence.

2) Unity of message across orgs & people. Consistent demands, all should know them.

3) There must be a long-term and coherent strategy, not just tactics & actions.

4) Police should be seen as potential recruits to movement, not enemy.

5) Keep national/international audience in mind when framing. Goal is win ppl over.

6) Defensive strategies never win. Don't respond to attacks using their language.

7) Claim victory whenever possible. Important for morale.

8) Keep anger in check /w solidarity actions & humor."

....

The revolution is at hand. Though naked, I will blend with the darkness. You will not see or hear me enter. I will cross over your well-trimmed lawn and slide quietly through a crevice, creeping into your privacy. My bare feet will not make a sound as I step across the kitchen tiles and the wooden floors in the hallway and passed the kids' rooms until I reach and open your door. I will stand over your sleeping body with my hand held out to lead you further into your nightmare.

Message to Occupy Denver/Wall Street

On The Need for International Solidarity and Civil Disobedience

Today's economic problems weren't created by a few bad policy decisions. They weren't created by the repeal of the Glass-Seagal act or the Supreme Court's Citizen's United ruling or the Bush tax cuts for the rich. And changing policy, while it might temporarily alleviate the suffering of a few, won't solve our problems. If we really intend to take our country back from the ruling class, we have to fundamentally alter the hit-and-run economy the ruling class has constructed to keep us down; we have to overthrow Capitalism and create a sincere Democracy in its stead.

Let's not forget that the affluence experienced by the middle classes of the 50s and 60s came at the expense of the working and peasant classes in other parts of the world. Capitalism can't function without exploitation, most especially the exploitation of labor. The economic problems we are experiencing today are a direct result of internal conflicts within the Capitalist system itself, specifically the crisis of over accumulation as income is consistently shifted from labor to capital. The problem isn't new, either. It's only new to a portion of the working classes of the First World who up to now have been benefiting from the monopoly control of corporations that reside in post-industrialized nations. The crisis of over-accumulation, however, is too severe at this point for the ruling class to allow First World workers to continue to share in the bounty. If the working classes of the First World want to get back their rights as human beings, not be forced to sell their labor at an ever decreasing price, they have to seek solidarity with the exploited of the Third World. What I mean to say is that the ninety nine percent has to include the non-ruling class members outside of the United States, and outside of Europe and Japan, as well. This has to be a world-wide movement or it's nothing.

That said, the movement also has to be more than a fashion statement, which is to say that it has to take seriously the idea that it might be effective and, as a result, draw down the wrath, disdain, and violence of the ruling class. It has to be prepared to do more than just chant slogans and sign petitions. It has to be ready to succeed, to become historically significant, which means it has to be prepared to break the rules of the system that created the problem and to effectively defend itself against the destructive powers that will inevitably coalesce once the movement becomes cohesive and proficient enough to be perceived as a genuine threat.

Limiting ourselves to legal strategies wont get us anywhere, nor will efforts to achieve solidarity with the police or military forces whose job it is to protect the ruling class from the people. Plenty of the men who donned SS uniforms may have been great fathers, husbands, sons, and friends. But they were still SS men. Their job was to serve and protect the Nazi system. Make no mistake, police officers are the enemy. They do not represent the ninety nine percent. They are not on our side simply by dint of being workers. It is their job to resist us, to protect them from us. And failure to see them as antagonistic is to side with the elites against the people, to side with apathy and against action and creativity. For any movement to make a difference it has to take risks, and that means standing up to the violence of the dominant power structure; that means defying not navigating power's commands. If you are not yet prepared to take real risks, if you are not yet ready to insist on your rights as a complete human being, if you are not quite ready to honestly assert yourself-—then you are not yet ready to occupy anything other than your couches and patio furniture.

Cave Of Forgotten Dreams

I saw Herzog's Cave of Forgotten Dreams the other night. I'm not a big fan of Herzog, and he does some of the same things in this film that made me dislike him (pseudo philosophizing, confusing tangents, etc.), but, when all is said and done, this is a film definitely worth seeing, if only for the opportunity to see the ancient cave drawings in 3D.

The first thing that strikes you is how well the drawings have been preserved. They don't look like they were made as much as 35,000 years ago. Some look as if they could have been drawn last week. Suddenly, 35,000 years ago doesn't seem that distant.

The next thing you notice is the quality of the drawings. They don't look like “primitive” drawings at all, not in the sense of being childish or simple, the way we too often stereotype anything primitive. One is drawn with eight legs, each set gradually fading, as if to suggest motion, creating a kind of proto-cinematic effect. Another, of a buffalo, depicts the head of the animal looking directly at the viewer, not to the side, demonstrating a knowledge of perspective tens of thousands of years before the Renaissance. The detail and firm elegant lines of a series of horses suggest a mastered and studied technique forged over several years in a rigorous art school. Two rhinos are clashing in combat, their bodies in full motion, perfectly proportioned in spite of the curved contours of the cave walls used as canvas. Even some of the less well drawn figures show evidence of sophistication and creativity. A series of lions are drawn in profile but with two Picassoesque eyes. A misshaped rhino propels its tongue out like a monster from a child's nightmare, creating an almost surreal effect.

The worst executed drawings are side by side with the best, the simplest with the most sophisticated. You feel, as a viewer, neither awed or repulsed, alienated neither by a specialized perfection or an amateur crudity. Instead, you feel a camaraderie with the artists, a sense of kinship for ancestors of a forgotten past. And once again 35,000 years doesn't seem that long ago.

But the sense of connection one feels doesn't come at the expense of wonder. To the contrary, the mystery only thickens as you ponder the drawings' purpose and meaning. The only human depictions are hands, mostly made by the same person, and, depending on your interpretation, a nude overweight female figure embraced by a buffalo. Everything else depicts a non-human animal, mostly horses, rhinos, lions, and buffalo. I saw one bear, but why only one? The cave floor is littered with bear skulls. One of them seems to be placed as if on a pedestal, ashes found below, suggesting a kind of worship. It's unlikely that humans ever lived in the cave (no human bones have been found). It was used only for art and maybe for worship. The cave was home only to other animals, primarily the bear, which, one would think, would weigh heavily on the artists' minds as they created. Yet only one bear is depicted. And if not bear, why not humans? Why only human hand prints? Why is there no history of a tribe drawn out such as you see in some of the ancient drawings from the Americas? Does the lack of the human form show a blissful lack of self-consciousness, an obedience to a lost tradition, symbols for a totemic ritual, or just a literal embodiment of the artists´ needs and desires or interests? We don't know. In the nearby cave at Lacroix, which is now closed, I have read that the original artists would have needed to crawl on their elbows and stomachs for over a hundred yards to reach the chamber of drawings. While easier to get to, the drawings at Chauvet are placed in a similarly peculiar location. Nothing is drawn at the mouth of the cave, the seemingly obvious and most convenient choice. Instead, the artists chose to draw further in, mostly at the very back, hidden in the depths. In other words, they would have needed to enter the potential home of a bear or lion and follow it to the very end, putting their lives unnecessarily at risk, just to draw or admire a few pictures. Why? If you require a logical explanation, you're unlikely to find one, since there isn't any logical reason to create the drawings in the first place. But even in that, in the unresolvable riddle of the drawings' existence, one feels a certain solidarity with the creators. The sense of mystery, the awe that comes over us as we look at their creations, is also their awe, their wonder, appreciation, and fear in the face of the non-human world. And just as they might not always have viewed themselves as part of that other world or, rather, feared their small place in it, their insignificance, so we too are fearful of our connection or lack of connection to them, to the primitive, to a people who lived alongside cave lions and wooly mammoths and saber tooth tigers and wolves double the size of what we know today, who may have worshiped bear, who hunted their own food and on a daily basis had cause to reflect upon their relationship to the non human world around them, a world much greater than themselves and beyond comprehension. Perhaps to mitigate the distance between themselves and their environment, to feel less small in their surroundings, they took to depicting some of the outer forces on cave walls, trying maybe to align themselves with those forces if not to control them, bringing cracks of light into the cave's overwhelming figurative and literal darkness. In such an act, we can better imagine ourselves reflected in the drawings, as we too try to come to terms with forces beyond our control and beyond our comprehension, with a past we have lost connection with. The drawings render us fatuous, and, drawn in by their mystery, we rediscover the same kinship with the artists that the artists may have sought with the objects of their drawings. As understanding fails, communion deepens.

The Wise Father and the Liberal Daughter

Below is something that's been circulating on Facebook recently. And my response to it.

Father & Daughter Talk

A young woman was about to finish her first year of college. Like so many others her age, she considered herself to be very liberal, and among other liberal ideals, was very much in favor of higher taxes to support more government programs, in other words redistribution of wealth.
She was deeply ashamed that her father was a rather staunch conservative, a feeling she openly expressed. Based on the lectures that she had participated in, and the occasional chat with a professor, she felt that her father had for years harbored an evil, selfish desire to keep what he thought should be his.
One day she was challenging her father on his opposition to higher taxes on the rich and the need for more government programs. The self-professed objectivity proclaimed by her professors had to be the truth and she indicated so to her father. He respond-
ed by asking how she was doing in school.
Taken aback, she answered rather haughtily that she had a 4.0 GPA, and let him know that it was tough to maintain, insisting that she was taking a very difficult course load and was constantly studying, which left her no time to go out and party like other people she knew. She didn't even have time for a boyfriend, and didn't really have many college friends because she spent all her time studying. Her father listened and then asked, How is your friend Audrey doing?
She replied, Audrey is barely getting by. All she takes are easy classes, she never studies and she barely has a 2.0 GPA. She is so popular on campus; college for her is a blast. She's always invited to all the parties and lots of times she doesn't even show up for classes because she's too hung over.
Her wise father asked his daughter, Why don't you go to the Dean's office and ask him to deduct 1.0 off your GPA and give it to your friend who only has a 2.0. That way you will both have a 3.0 GPA and certainly that would be a fair and equal distribution of GPA.
The daughter, visibly shocked by her father's suggestion, angrily fired back, That's a crazy idea, how would that be fair! I've worked really hard for my grades! I've invested a lot of time, and a lot of hard work! Audrey has done next to nothing toward her degree. She played while I worked my tail off!
The father slowly smiled, winked and said gently, Welcome to the conservative side of the fence.?
If you ever wondered what side of the fence you sit on, this is a great test!


I guess if you're an active Fox News viewer, you might find that anecdote convincing. But to any sane person it's an obvious false analogy that bypasses the much more difficult task of providing an accurate critical analysis of class and political reality. Let's see, if I agree that the winning basketball team shouldn't have to give up some of its points to the loser, then that must mean that competition should serve as my model for every human and non-human interaction I ever experience. God, why have I been so stupid not to see that? It's so simple!

Let me give you a slightly more accurate analogy:

Let's say that you go on a tourist safari in Africa with nine other people and you get lost in the jungle. The group soon runs out of supplies and is forced to hunt and scavenge for its survival. After two days, no one has had any luck and everyone is getting weaker and weaker from lack of food and water. Then Mr. Mumabi, the only local in the group, the one who best knows the terrain and how to survive there, makes a kill. He eats the dead animal in front of the entire group and refuses to share. “I earned this meat,” he says. “I worked really hard to shoot and skin that animal.” He contentedly finishes his hearty supper and fades into a peaceful sleep as the other nine people share a handful of berries and move closer and closer to starvation.

That seems pretty bad, but if I want to accurately analogize the current corporate monopoly capitalist system, I need to add a few more sadistic details. What I failed to mention is that in addition to being the only local and therefore understanding the terrain better than anyone else, Mr. Mumabi is also the only experienced hunter and the only person with a knowledge of what berries and plants are edible and what ones are poisonous, knowledge he refuses to share with his “competitors”. I also forgot to mention that the animal he killed was an adult wildabeast, and, since the group doesn't have a freezer to preserve the meat, about ninety percent of it will go to waste. But Mr. Mumabi still refuses to share because he earned that meat and made the kill on his own with nobody's help. He worked hard, after all.

But even with those details, I'm still not accurately representing the political realities of modern day capitalism. I also forgot to mention that Mr. Mumabi owns three fourths of the land the group is traveling on and refuses to let anyone else hunt on his property. The rest of the group then has to share the remaining twenty five percent of the terrain, which, unfortunately, isn't an area known for attracting game animals and has very few water sources. Not only that but Mr. Mumabi is the only person in the group with a gun, and he refuses to let anyone else use it. He worked hard for the money to buy that gun, you know.

By now you should be getting an idea of just how absurdly cruel our economic and political system is, but I'm not through. It gets worse. It isn't enough that Mr. Mumabi owns most all of the land and all of the means of production for securing one's survival and refuses to share any of it with the others, but the rest of the group, if they do, with their limited resources and knowledge, manage to find any food on their small portion of land, will have to give some of it away as a government tax. Mr. Mumabi, however, because he represents a corporation (or we could just say that he is a corporation, because, according to the Supreme Court, the terms 'human being' and 'corporation' mean the same thing), doesn't have to pay anything at all, not even a property tax. Not only does he not have to give up any of his disproportionate share of the pie, the government will actually give him a larger share. They provide incentives and subsidies to make his land yield yet more food and more wealth. And if it doesn't yield any wealth, worse yet if it costs more than it yields, the government will probably bail Mr. Mumabi out because he's simply too big to fail.

If you're a conservative Fox viewer, you might be saying to yourself that my analogy is misleading. You might say that Mr. Mumabi, in the real world, would not let the food he earned go to rot because that doesn't make any sense, even for a selfish capitalist. And you're partially right, in the real world when someone earns more wealth than he can possibly ever use in his lifetime, he doesn't let it rot, he sells his surplus so that he can make yet more money and more surplus. You might also, if you've been getting your information from Fox News, say that in the real world the richest ten percent don't own seventy five percent of the world's resources. And, again, you're partially right. In America, the richest ten percent own more than eighty percent of the wealth, and the bottom eighty percent own a paltry fourteen percent (and those are 2007 numbers; the problem is much worse today), but worldwide the gap is much, much bigger. (And, if I really wanted to be accurate, I would have to add that the little wealth available from the small portion of land allotted to the poorest among us is leased to multinational corporations who use it to make yet more wealth and then give only a small, very small, percentage of the original borrowed wealth back to the original owners, thereby increasing poverty). You might also contend that the richest corporations do pay taxes, and, again, you're right to an extent: A few of them do pay “some” taxes, but not very much. Almost all of the financial institutions that tanked our economy last year, for example, paid nothing for that year's taxes—not a single cent, and they also received a trillion dollar bonus for the trouble they caused us. But, if you're a conservative viewer of Fox news, you probably still don't believe my analogy represents a fair criticism of the status quo. You might say that Mr. Mumabi deserves his exceptionally large share of the pie. Maybe he doesn't necessarily work harder than the others, but, by dint of being raised in the jungle by a family of experienced hunters, he was essentially destined to have more than the rest. That's the way God, or Darwin, planned it. And maybe you're right. But if that's the case, you'll have to calmly accept that it is also Destiny's hand when the other nine members of the group chop Mr. Mumabi's head off and eat the rest of his wildabeast and take his supplies. After all, in the real world, that's what would likely happen. But there's one more detail I left out: Mr. Mumabi also owns a military complex that protects his interests, and, even more importantly, a conglomerate of media institutions, including Fox News, that convinces the other nine people that they're being treated fairly and that what's really happening is that Mr. Mumabi is getting deservedly better grades and shouldn't be asked to share his GPA with the others—that it's really Mr. Mumabi who's being picked on.

novel fragment: thoughts on identity formation

I looked again at what I had written. I was unsatisfied. I felt as if I hadn’t clearly delineated for myself the line between blending and adapting and being appropriated. How firm do the boundaries have to be? I wasn’t sure. I felt as if the answers to that question were crucial to my own personal development. There was something, I thought, to the idea of mixing on an abstract level—culturally—while still simplifying and protecting one’s literal space. It was important, I reasoned, not merely from an ecological but from a spiritual and ethical perspective, to live in relationship to one’s surroundings, to inhabit a specific location. That literal groundedness had to be preserved not only because it would necessitate an ecologically responsible lifestyle—a way of life that makes evident and obligatory the reason for nurturing and maintaining what nurtures and maintains you—but also because it would keep a person humble, aware, as I had written, that humans exist only as a part of creation and not merely as its creators and stewards—that life is interdependent—separated still, but interdependent. And once that sense of symbiosis is lost—once the partner in the relationship is viewed merely as resource, as convenience, and not as something whose well-being is part of your own and vice versa, once a relationship to one part of one’s surroundings is lost or abstracted, then all other relationships are affected—the way becomes hidden and buried. The relationship one has to space and time affects how one relates to other humans. And it affects self-growth and development, the ability to be a complete and heroic person. If we as modern human beings have become machines, it is because machines have mediated and even severed our relationship to the land, to the soil and blood that created us. If we see the land we live on as a resource to fulfill human needs, we are likely to see other human beings the same way—as resources. If the land is not granted autonomy, neither can human beings. And if we interact with the land we live on only as dirt to be tread and scenery to be viewed or fruit to be plucked—if its presence as our creator is not constant—we will interact with other human beings in the same careless manner. And we will suffer.

So the trends towards isolation, ideas and tools and laws that promote surpassing and not understanding human limits, must be withstood, but history has likewise shown that any effort to completely repel such forces will end in failure—will vitiate and destroy the resistance. Some degree of integration—of knowledge and contact with the enemy soul—is crucial for any resistance movement.

I thought about my personal situation—how I had moved to a somewhat isolated commune in Wyoming but still spent time in New York City. I didn’t need to keep my teaching job in New York; I wanted to. Truth is, I enjoy my job. I enjoy the teaching, the academic culture, and I also enjoy New York City. At the same time, I have come to see both cultures, academic and urban, as inherently noxious. In other words, I haven’t maintained contact with the darkness so as to better recognize and resist it; I’ve maintained contact because I enjoy doing so—because those cultures are a part of me; they bring me pleasure, and, without them, I would feel lost and rejected. How then, I have to wonder, can I achieve liberation?

My conflation with the forces that I theoretically object to explains perhaps why so many revolutionary efforts, both public and private, have failed entirely or mirrored the culture they wish to overthrow. In trying to achieve liberation, I was being forced to cast myself away. I was revolting against myself. It’s one thing to avoid appropriation but quite another to create selfhood once the appropriation of the self has already occurred. I had become one kind of outcast and was attempting to become another so that I might find a place in the world—so I might end my exile, my outcast existence. And the darkness I fought against was a part of me.

I’m thinking about race in America. Growing up in small town Idaho, I did not personally know any black people. During my Junior year in High School, I remember that a newly adopted boy transferred in from Botswana Africa, but he was two grades below me and I don’t recall ever talking to him. For the most part, my acquaintance with black people came through popular media, so most of the black people I knew were of two types: athletes and comedians (or sometimes, as with Muhammad Ali, they were both). I knew of Dr. J and OJ Simpson. I knew of Bill Cosby, Richard Pryor, and Eddie Murphy. I knew of movie stereotypes such as Sambo (there was a local restaurant named Sambos, featuring a logo of a black man with a bone through his hair and a large ring through his nose) and Buckwheat and Uncle Remus. I knew of Samford and the Jeffersons and of musical entertainers such as Sammy Davis Jr. and Stevie Wonder. Black people, in other words, were familiar to me only as TV images. It was a time in America in which images of African Americans were changing, a time in which the traditional clown images that served obviously to comfort white audiences into believing that black identity could be regulated were still intact but now served not to suggest that black people were better off being cared for by racially superior whites but to convince a recently desegregated nation that black people weren’t really that scary—that they could be as civilized and as tame and as harmless as white people.

At the same time, as if to counter such a blatant appropriation of blackness, these comforting media clown images were supplanted with less comforting images, by films, for example, in which blacks portrayed themselves as the embodiment of everything that whites most feared—violence, sexual potency, unruliness…. The blaxploitation films, however, didn’t really make it to rural Idaho. So for me, black people were typified more by the Louis Armstrongs and Joe Louises and Jesse Owenses and Hattie McDaniels than by the Charlie Parkers and Malcolm Xes and Tommie Smiths and Foxy Browns and Cleopatra Joneses. The latter were there, but they lurked behind the other images, as darkened subtext. As a result, it didn’t strike me as unusual for one of my friends to comment that she loved black people, as if black people were a homogenous group whose every member fit a clear and distinct definition. Fact is, I loved them too. Black people, as I knew them, kept the darkness, kept black people, out of sight.

Undoubtedly, both the blackface minstrel show and the 70s blaxploitation films served a similar purpose; they both portrayed blackness from the perspective of white people. You could say, as many popular culture critics have, that both forms of entertainment perpetuated slavery, allowing white people to own black identity without literally purchasing the black body. And that may be true up to a point, but they also offered to blacks an avenue to power, narrow as it was. When blacks donned the blackface themselves, buffooning both their race as well as the masks that portrayed it, and when black writers and producers deliberately objectified themselves in 70s action films, they were claiming, in a way, the only power offered them. They were walking through the one open door whereby they could access and participate in the world (and, if their buffoonery were extreme enough, they could even call into question the world and the boundaries that white livelihoods depended on). That door may have looked at first like an escape—and it opened up no doubt to a refreshing change of scenery—but it turned out to be a well marked path surrounded by bars—an opening from one cage into another. Still, it marked one’s entry, at some level at least and only within very confined circumstances, into the culture of power.

A case can be made that such a deal with the devil might be a necessity—that one must do what it takes to gain entry, and that, once inside, once granted membership in humanity, one can participate in shaping and maybe reforming the universal human face. But identity it seems is defined as much or moreso by what it isn’t as by what is. Culture can be shaped from outside. And when America tells itself that its face isn’t black, isn’t Mexican, isn’t Indian, isn’t Soviet—when it sets up markers for definition, it makes itself dependent on those markers, and, like figure with ground, it shares its destiny. Consequently, both the marker and the marked have an interest, a necessity even, in preserving the boundary that separates them. For both sides it represents a form of power, though for the demeaned element that power comes at extreme cost—the cost of perpetuating an image of themselves as inferior. By accepting, for example, the power offered to black males in the bedroom and the gymnasium, one simultaneously perpetuates a racist image of the black man as less evolved, less mental than physical, closer to the other animals than to humans in his development. But it does give him at least a voice, a voice he might use to counter the racist mythology.

In a modern world delineated not by physical boundaries, by blood ties or territory, but by abstractions—God, the nation state, professional status—identity formation becomes an exceptionally precarious and unnerving process. That insecurity about who we are can lead to such a desperate willingness to clarify and strengthen the boundaries that distinguish and define us that even minorities whose societal images are negative might wish to preserve their inferior status, especially if their inferior status is superior to other groups—they might wish to preserve the stereotypes as markers with which they can shield themselves from evil—as a means of preserving at least some social role or to keep what little identity they have from becoming extinct. Even a false or imposed identity is something, a defense against the void and the dominant culture. So the black man imitates the stereotypical thug, becomes Shaft; or the female wields sex as a weapon, becomes the Black Widow, both embodying the fears that keep themselves and their oppressors in existence—and oppression merely changes form but remains steady and ubiquitous.

Over time, the machine will find a way to incorporate its negation. Then other villains will be created and the process will begin anew. But at some point—it seems obvious—we have to step out of that cycle. And I think it’s possible to do so, not likely perhaps, but possible. I'm not convinced that we're doomed. I’m not suggesting we can or should do away completely with stereotypes. To do so would only increase our anxiety and subsequently our oppression of one another. And generalizations are useful. An effective jazz improv solo can’t exist without a song standard to initiate and frame it, and neither can a genuine individuality emerge without a template to react against and drive it onward. It should be understood, however, that the personality is no different than a jazz solo—it’s a creation, a mix of time, place, and circumstance through which something previously unseen is seen, is lit up. The fictional character created by the playwright and actor’s collaboration is no different than the character created by daily life, which isn’t to say, as some strains of Buddhist philosophy tells us, that our selves are unreal. The characters we make of ourselves, the magician’s tricks, might be temporary and they might be mere symbols, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t real. In fact, they might be the only part of us that is real—a reality whose nascent form emerges from and depends upon the artificial. Put another way, the real can’t exist without the unreal and vice versa. Figure needs ground.

I’m not sure when it happened, but at some point in American history, the idea of freedom was appropriated. The meaning today is the exact opposite of what it was likely meant to signify (or perhaps the concept was created only to mask any real potential for liberty). Today it connotes an escape from foundation, from ground—a flight away from everything that is deemed unstable and uncertain. Freedom today connotes a completely alien and impossible notion of individuality and disconnect, and, in the name of freedom, understood as a paradoxical flight from engagement, from the very things that create us, we are systematically destroying ourselves. In trying to tame the darkness, to take refuge in the light, in figure, we have raped ourselves several times over. We have driven ourselves insane.

That isn’t inflammatory rhetoric, either. We have become like an eagle trying to be free of its wings. We have waged war against our bodies, the food that nourishes those bodies, our expressive potential, our symbols of all kinds, our passions—everything that makes us human. Freedom has become escape and escape has become a need to transcend life itself. We have become a culture in love with death, with a more sinister kind of death than is possible, with a death that represents no kind of regeneration—an utter silencing.

The concept of freedom hasn’t yet been completely co-opted. We still hold on to counter notions rooted in ideals of democracy—in real democracy, I mean, wherein each person participates directly in his/her fate as well as the fate of the community, wherein each person creates an individuality that embraces and integrates darkness and uncertainty rather than expels them, wherein identity may doubt itself without feeling humiliated. Those ideals have not died all together. They live on in Jazz solos, in various novels and poems, in wilderness areas, in contemplation, in tragedy, in dreams and nightmares—in all types of fictional truth. But the space allowed those ideals grows increasingly narrow.

RAW

Hey blogger pals, consider yourselves officially invited to participate long distance in our group for revolutionary writers and artists:

RAW

Special Interests

I used to take pride in America's relative lack of class consciousness. Unlike Europe and Latin America, people in the US, as a general rule, don't like to overtly call attention to how much money they make. Most Americans, rich and poor alike, prefer a casual, practical style of dress. T-shirts and jeans work for corporate CEOs as well as plumbers. It's considered an honor to have friends from different socioeconomic backgrounds. And you hardly ever hear anyone talk seriously about High Class Culture in tones that aren't ridiculing. Our popular films make fun of snobbery and, while we sometimes laugh at them, the icons of our culture have often been everyday Joes--alias Homer Simpsons or Ralph Kramdens or Mr. Smiths or Davy Crocketts. We even require a certain level (or pretense) of "average Joeness" in our elected leaders.

But recently I've come to see the "average Joe" phenomenon a little differently. While America, the culture not the government, does propagate a positive respect for the everyman, I no longer think lacking class consciousness is something to brag about. It's exactly the opposite, actually--a cause for fear and shame. The sad truth is that lacking class consciousness means next to nothing if you're not also lacking class divisions. And class divisions are pronounced and ubiquitous features of American culture. In truth, American class divisions might be even sterner and more constant than they are in other countries because in America they aren't honestly looked at or analyzed. Our culture keeps them hidden and thereby protected.

Take the phrase "special interests", for example. We love to complain about the excessive governmental influence of "special interests", but, literally speaking, "special interests" don't have undue or excessive influence at all. The homeless are a special interest group and no one suggests that they have too much influence on government policy. Same goes for migrant farm workers and single mothers and artists and scrabble players. The phrase "special interests" is an unequivocal euphemism. What we really mean to say is "the ruling class". But we won't say that because if we did we would have to face the reality that our government is run by the same upper class grinches we love to ridicule in popular films and culture--that the term American democracy is just a euphemism for plutocracy--that the American government cares more about corporations than individual citizens. If we call the elites special interests groups, we can safely keep fiction and reality separate. We can continue to champion the average Joe without having to actually act (or vote) in his interests. The government (with even more ease than before thanks to the Supreme Court's recent decision) can continue to represent corporate interests at everyone else's expense, for if we dared realize that the fictional Mr. Burns-and-Mr. Potter-run America is more real than the one we mistake for reality, then one or the other America would have to be destroyed: the culture or the government. So, instead, one serves to hide and enable the other, to point to the truth only as a fictional gimmick while the real gimmick masquerades as truth, and everyone sleeps peacefully.

Why I'm Not a Primitivist

Actually, I could just as easily title it "Why I am a Primitivist", because what I really mean to do is to counter the assumptions people often make about my primitive-inspired values.

I do not, for example, advocate a literal return to a primitive lifestyle. Fact is, we can't. In the same way that a frog can't once again become a tadpole, modern human beings can't again become primitives; we have physically changed too much to do so. With the advent first of mono agriculture and then the printing press and then of cars and computers and cell phones, etc., our brains have been rewired. Make no mistake, machines are now a part of us. We are cyborgs. And while we might learn to split with machines, to tear them painfully from our flesh, we cannot rid ourselves of their memories, nor should we. Our interaction with technology has on a very literal level reconfigured our consciousness. The modern brain, while certainly no better than the primitive brain, is unquestionably different, with a different skill set and a different outlook, and denying that reality can only lead to further mistakes in our journey. There is no restore option on the human brain.

Not only that, but even if it were possible to go back to a primitive way of life, we would still not be able to do so, because we don't really know what primitive life was like. The evidence of our primitive history is far too insufficient to make any kind of reliable broad hypothesis. Plus, one of the few things we do know about primitive life is that it was immensely diverse, much more diverse than our homogeneous existence today allows us to even imagine. Evidence among existing indigenous communities verifies at least that much, so the idea of generalizing about primitive existence and then using that generalization as a pattern for building new sustainable communities seems slightly far fetched. Who's to say which primitive history, forged in response to different environmental conditions, should guide us?

Nonetheless, while we can't return to a primitive lifestyle, we can't escape it, either. We do have to integrate our past. And suggestions that we have evolved or progressed since primitive times strike me as an effort to do just that--to deny both history and reality, to deprecate our full selves. If we can learn from the ancient Greeks and Romans, from 1st century Chinese philosophers and 12th century Italian poets and 6th Century Arabian mathematicians, then we can learn from primitives, as well. And while we can't ever again live as our primitive ancestors did, we can again live without exploiting and depleting the resources upon which we depend for our survival, something most evidence suggests our primitive ancestors did far better than we do now. At the same time, we can learn more from modern indigenous cultures about democracy and freedom than we can from all the political theorists who have ever lived. In sum, though much has been irretrievably lost, there's also much more we can do to integrate primitivism into our modern consciousness. That's what I'm advocating.

Put another way, while I'm not literally a primitivist, I am an anti anti primitivist. In other words, I'm opposed to the tradition that describes our ancestral lives as "nasty, brutish, and short" and as something that needs to be left behind and forgotten. And I'm opposed, zealously opposed, to the idea that our species has progressed, an idea wrought with arrogance and racism. What I suspect we mean when we talk about progress is that we are now smarter than we once were and smarter, much smarter, than those who still live as we once did. We mean that we're smarter, in the same way that whites are smarter than blacks, men smarter than women, and humans smarter than other animal species, and, because we're smarter, we're better, and because we're better, we're entitled to use our inferiors as we see fit, belittling them thoroughly enough, we hope, to erase them from our DNA. We're entitled to control even our memories of them, to view even memories, as resources.

For a long time, living in another state and not subject to the daily reminders of my past religious upbringing, I began to deny that I ever took religion seriously. I began to weed that aspect out of my life altogether, even to the point in which it seemed ridiculous to take criticism of the church seriously. Much like lecturing a two year old for not sharing her toys, it just didn't seem worth much effort, not more than a brief scolding. How could I take something seriously that was so blatantly childish and unethical? But, thanks in some part to my blogger pals, I've come to realize just how thoroughly religion has shaped my personality, and how, in attempting to erase that element from my past, I had gotten lost. In no way am I saying that modern mainstream religion has valuable life lessons on a par with primitive life. (I believe there is such a thing as ethical progress, which, I think, can be applied to my evolution away from religion but not to the modernization of the human species.) But I am saying that much, though not all, of my dismissal of religion has been based on the idea of rising above, of transcending--rather than integrating, developing, and relating to--my roots. A butterfly can't go back to being a caterpillar, but neither can it erase the caterpillar from memory and identity.

Rushed Undeveloped Post

In preparation for seeing my blogger pals soon, I decided to quickly post something:

Yesterday I paid a visit to the African American Clinic for a free medical examination, which started with a blood test. The nurse found a vein and put the needle in, but, at first, nothing happened. So she wiggled the needle around until the blood finally started to flow and filled the vial. At one point, I said to the nurse that I was feeling dizzy. I learned later that what I had actually said was that I feel “dizzzzzzzz”. After that, I went to my happy place. I don’t remember what I was dreaming but I remember not wanting to be woken. When I did come back, I wasn’t sure where I was. I started to think I had had some kind of accident and was now on the verge of death, in a hospital as a team of medics were trying to save me. Then my awareness returned. I was given some orange juice and a sandwich to bring my blood sugar back up.

Two other times in my life, I have passed out (been knocked out a few more), once when I was swimming and got caught between my dad’s legs trying to come up for air and the other in a Washington DC office where I interned and I overheard a conversation about accidental asphyxiation. What I remember from both incidents is the idea, which I obtained after the events, that death would not be as painful as I had imagined.

In reference to my last post, I’ve been wondering about how hierarchy both creates identity and makes the realization of human needs impossible. One thing I don’t like to admit is that part of what appeals to me about my travels to Central America is the sense of privilege I feel as an American. I’ve learned that being ideologically opposed to privilege doesn’t prevent me from enjoying it. And what is sometimes even more enjoyable than the sense of privilege is the sense of self-righteousness I feel when I try to resist being treated preferentially, when I refuse the privilege that is offered me. That, too, is another privilege—the privilege of being charitable, of being capable of giving charity.

But it isn’t real charity I’m participating in. Rather, it’s a purchase. In exchange for feeling self-righteous, for having a good conscious, I give someone lower on the social hierarchy my money or my time or my respect … something. The recipient has no reason to respect my generosity, because it isn’t real generosity. Even if I wanted to be truly generous, I couldn’t. The system we live in doesn’t allow it.

I remember when I worked at the County Jail. I had numerous volunteers helping me out and I was a little surprised that the inmates didn’t seem very thankful for the volunteers' efforts. I knew I was grateful, so…. But now I’m starting to get it. You can’t be charitable nor can you be honestly thankful for the pseudo-charity you receive in the world as we’ve created it. Honest charity and thankfulness can only exist as acts of absolute uncompromise and revolt.

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.