Naples, Florida

Happy Holidays!

Flower Child

Willa and Georgia, being five and six years older than me, chose, as children, their flowers first. Georgia chose lilies of the valley and Willa had daisies. I loved all flowers, and was disappointed that I couldn't count theirs among the rest, though I had no interest in possession.

"What is your favorite flower?" Only women understood this question. My father jokingly called every flower a "sweet pea" as I, scruffy wildflower, dutifully tended his secret garden with one long-neck Strohs after the other, the TV droning loudly and men all across town putting their feet up after a hard day's work.

Few men could fight in a war and express joy in a flower. Flowers were as unnoticed as women, who were allowed scholarship of the irrelevant, in fields vast and immaterial. Open ornamental wild and strong. Pansies petunias silly girls. Dolly was an underrated chrysanthemum, spicy hardy and long-lasting. Shrinking violets. Lovely lady slippers. Do not pick! Some women were roses, but none in my family. I have known women who were prickly and sour, nasturtiums and nettles. Invasive. Cultivated. Delicate and sweet, aggressive, bold, tempermental. Impermanent. Beautiful.

I love water lilies riding on a lake. A frog sits motionless on a shiny green lilly pad. Waxy bright buttercups and a field full of dandelions. The miracle of a jack-in-the-pulpit in the forest and apple blossoms falling like pink rain in blue sky. All are my flowers, but I will not claim them for my own. I will share them with you, good friend. Every one is for you.

Future Shades of Blue

1. Monday, Dec 19, 2005: Take the day off work and pick up Mo at the airport.

Beautiful girl, stepping off the plane in a blue city dress... carrying your self, fragile and forged with fire and steel...

2. Wednesday, Dec 21, 2005: Holiday break begins after work

Imperfect vision, my daughter sad and happy before me

3. Thursday, Dec 22, 2005: Take Mo to the airport and send her home to NYC

I love you forever, Mo, with a bond elastic and steel, forged in blue flames

4. Get on a plane to Florida

Above the clouds I will decide that things are never cut and dried
flowers prickly preserved and dense with color
but will always bear the unobservable
shades of blue
faded
hidden nuances of color
the human eye
primitive instrument
obstruction of perception
cannot recognize
Cast off

5. Spend 12 days in Naples, feet in sand, eyes seaward toward shades of blue

Note to Self

My birthday was yesterday, and (is this related?) lately I have taken to listening to The Moody Blues in the morning before work, especially their song You and I, which I follow with Neil Young's plaintive song by the same name.

Open up your eyes see a lifetime fly
Open up and let the light back in

In my i tunes alphabetized library suddenly songs of the same name have appeared side-by-side. I wonder if these songs are dangerous, with their connected messages and winding paths to places off-limits. I never know until it's too late. I add things to the "do not do" list after the damage is done these days. 1. Don't sort through old photographs. 2. Don't drink too much wine 3. Don't pressure son to buy pot. HA! 4. Don't isolate yourself compulsively. 5. 6. 7.

Following modern folk wisdom which I internally pre-ridicule I "get out and do things". Go to dinner. Call a friend. Tidy up.

What will be our last thought, 
Do you think it's coming soon,
Will it be of comfort 
Or the pain of a burning wound? 

All we are trying to say 
Is we are all we've got. 
You and me just cannot fail 
If we never, never stop. 

Laughter, Sacrifice, Mourning and You

I have rediscovered Donny Hathaway, and his voice, with its dynamic but faded shade of melancholy, has taken up residence in my mind. I only listen when I am fully girded-up in impenetrable armour, paying strict attention to melody, singing along. Letting myself get lost in the depth of Donny Hathaway's A Song for You is a recipe for emotional disaster. I begin to regret a past that never existed. I sacrifice myself to the love god.

And speaking of sacrifice, I saw The Chronicles of Narnia yesterday, and although I didn't think it came close to the depth of the books (It was a Disney movie, after all. How could it not slide into cartoon-character voices, over-simplification and other atrocities that fit their blueprint for "success"?), I did really love the childrens' faces, especially Lucy and Susan, and I liked being reminded of how I felt when first reading the series. That feeling of wonder, of wider purpose, being called to be a warrior (a girl, no less!), the hero's journey, recognition of purpose.

So for that I was thankful, and also for big winter coats, and long-lost loves, and snow.... and especially for laughter. It seems that many of us need laughter now. How can we not be overcome with sorrow as we watch the political corruption around us? How can we tolerate the injustice and not self-destruct as we watch our government arrogantly dominate and destroy?

Gidget is bemoaning Mykeru's disappearance from the blogosphere, and this poem, left in a comment on his site from this interesting-looking blog addresses the necessity of laughter.

A Brief for the Defense 

Sorrow everywhere.  Slaughter everywhere.  If babies
are not starving someplace, they are starving
somewhere else.  With flies in their nostrils.
But we enjoy our loves because that's what God wants.
Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not be made so fine.  The Bengal tiger would not
be fashioned so miraculously well.  The poor women
at the fountain are laughing together between
the suffering they have known and the awfulness
in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody
in the village is very sick.  There is laughter
every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta,
and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay.
If we deny our happiness, resist satisfaction,
we lessen the importance of their deprivation.
We must risk delight.  We can do without pleasure,
but not delight.  Not enjoyment.  We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world.  To make injustice the only
measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.
If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,
we should give thanks that the end had magnitude.
We must admit that there will be music despite everything.
We stand at the prow again of a small ship
anchored late at night in the tiny port
looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront
is three shuttered cafes and one naked light burning.
To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat
comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth
all the years of sorrow that are to come.
—Jack Gilbert

But it's not only Mykeru who is on overload. I put up new curtains, reign-in my raging anger at our government, go to a movie. Another whittles away at student loan debt, keeping her eyes on the ledger, watching her debt diminish. One hopes for sanity within long sleepless nights. Another dispassionately disconnects. We fear connection. We fear disconnection. We have no captain at the helm of this vessel that carries us, in the name of god, toward the next atrocity.

I saw Syriana a couple of days ago. The flatness of the presentation of evil, the corruption, the length our government will go to ensure corporate dominance.... Rich man, Poor man, Beggar man, Thief, Doctor, Lawyer, Indian Chief... truth and fiction have merged, kids, and I am left counting pennies, throwing bread at the birds outside, watching the Great Lakes die. We no longer think that we can change things.

Still, there are voices speaking, if we are allowed to hear them. I drop my curtains. They are nothing to me. A child smiles. A car swerves in the snow.

[My country] now occupies 702 military installations throughout the world in 132 countries... [My country] possesses 8,000 active and operational nuclear warheads. Two thousand are on hair trigger alert, ready to be launched with 15 minutes warning... The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It's a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.

I put to you that the United States is without doubt the greatest show on the road. Brutal, indifferent, scornful and ruthless it may be but it is also very clever. As a salesman it is out on its own and its most saleable commodity is self love. It's a winner. Listen to all American presidents on television say the words, 'the American people', as in the sentence, 'I say to the American people it is time to pray and to defend the rights of the American people and I ask the American people to trust their president in the action he is about to take on behalf of the American people.

It's a scintillating stratagem. Language is actually employed to keep thought at bay. The words 'the American people' provide a truly voluptuous cushion of reassurance. You don't need to think. Just lie back on the cushion. The cushion may be suffocating your intelligence and your critical faculties but it's very comfortable. This does not apply of course to the 40 million people living below the poverty line and the 2 million men and women imprisoned in the vast gulag of prisons, which extends across the US. (Harold Pinter, The Nobel Lecture, Thursday, December 8, 2005)

Along with Donny Hathaway I remember Roberta Flack, who sang one of the most soulful, haunting, self-incriminating anti-war ballads of the Vietnam era, Business Goes on as Usual.

Business goes on as usual
The corn and the profits are high
And TV's boom in every living room
They tell us what deodorant to buy

Business goes on as usual
Except that my brother is dead
He was twenty-five and very much alive
Now the dreams have all been blasted from his head

In a far-off land with a gun in his hand
He died in a war he did not understand

Business goes on as usual
There's plenty to choose from the racks
And rumour goes that the latest thing in clothes
That the latest thing in clothes will be black

The Death-Grip of Identity

I suspect that everything I do is designed, consciously or unconsciously, to drive me further toward the edge of my limits. The need to step out of boundaries seems to be instinctual to me, which is strange since Dolly has cushioned herself in a small town, in her home, with familiar people, objects and routine her whole life. My father Calvin did the same, however unhappily. Where does the rebellion gene come from? How did I become the restless one, never satisfied?

Who were you when you were 10 years old? Were you a friendly kid? A bit hyper perhaps, maybe scared of the dark? Did you love your mom and did you joyfully ride your bike, celebrating every road burn? Were you scared of your dad? Were you bold and expansive? Were you open and unafraid? What did you look like?

Look at you now. The strengths, the potential, the potency of that 10-year-old kid, were they encouraged, facilitated, appreciated by those around you, and were you allowed to become your best self? Are you a confident self-actuated person?

Does it matter? We are what we are. Our little successes, failures, worries, desires, death-grip on the identity that we have inherited, or created, or stumbled-into. Stoned. There's not a hair's breadth difference between the seemingly huge "successes" of a Brad Pitt and your daily ups and downs. His money? Probably from bad karma, a stumbling block, a worry, the opposite of what it seems. Again I am reminded of something I heard once...there are hundreds of Brad Pitts out there, just as good looking and just as talented. They just aren't famous.

I must tell Mallory. There is a place that is calling me, another level where I must go. Can she help me get there? I don't know. It has to do with identity, and how it is formed... how it is lost. It has to do with the ways we negotiate a persona, the wearing of masks, the search for freedom and transcendence of the self. The desire for a grounded self when there is no "self".

"I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together"
John Lennon
October 9, 1940 - December 8, 1980

goo goo g'joob

White People, Let's Get a Backbone, Shall We?

Alas, a blog, has some posts (and a great cartoon, below) by Barry Deutsch on racism that are worth reading.

by Barry Deutch (click here for a LARGER VERSION)

Deutch talks about the privilege that comes with skin color in Privilege is Driving a Smooth Road and Not Even Knowing It.

When strangers often think less of you because of your sex or race, you have less access to the material benefits of our society and economy.

People with more privilege, in contrast, can easily imagine that they are independent. A big mark of privilege is that social and economic networks tend to facilitate goals, rather than block them.

And inspired by Prometheus 6 (this is worth reading, too), Deutch wrote How Not to Be Insane When Accused of Racism (A Guide For White People), in which he encourages whites not to overreact when accused (faIrly or unfairly) of racism.

It's true - a lot of white people, hell, most white people turn ten different colors of pissed off and shoot steam out their ears if someone suggests they've said something racist. And if you make a point of talking about race and racism, sooner or later someone will accuse you of being racist, fairly or unfairly.

Frankly, I think we whites - especially, we whites who think of ourselves as against racism - have to get over it.

Read them in their entirety at Alas, a blog. OK?

Blinded

Back-to-back appointments yesterday with the opthalmologist and optometrist left me dilated, blinded by light, waiting, tested, poked, measured, deadened, puffed with air, filled with drops and told I was a "good patient", which is worrisome. I must talk to Mallory about this "compliment", which I am sure must be my biggest fault. I opened my eyes wide and let the drops enter, filled out the patient information completely and earnestly struggled to figure out, is the first group of letters or the second group clearer? "Can I see the first one again, please?"

I remember before Mo's surgery she was supposed to drink barium, and I sat in the hospital with her for hours while, after drinking one of the two required bottles, she refused another drop. Stressing out, I tried different methods of persuasion, none of which had the slightest effect. In the end it made no difference whatsoever. The surgery went on as scheduled and the world didn't stop spinning and now that emotional time is a distant memory, the details of which are mostly forgotten. Waiting rooms, hospital cafeterias, balloons, flowers, unmarked hallways to the morgue, a moaning woman down the hall...

Then I went to the video store and rented RIZE, a documentary about a wave of hip-hop street dancing called "...'krumping,' a wildly athletic style in which arms, legs, and bodies fly with a frenzied abandon that moves at almost inhuman speeds. Rize follows the birth of clown dancing and krumping in South Central, and records how many young people have adopted the dance as a style of competition, offering a safer and healthier alternative to the gang culture that has long dominated Los Angeles." (MTV.com)



I loved the documentary because it's about authentic art that rises up from the people and isn't created from the top down. You can tell it's art because it continually changes. At one point a dancers says the moves keep changing every day and if you're not there, you miss it. And then there's the sorry truth that minority art forms change as mainstream culture continually co-opts the "others" culture and makes money off their art.

The only problem I had with the movie is when footage of krumping was juxtaposed with African tribal dancing. It was strikingly similar, but what was the message? That African Americans have this kind of dancing hard-wired into their DNA? That kids in South Central are like African tribes? That both groups are acting-out violent events as a means to....prevent violence?

One lie that we are taught as good white children is that African tribes are "primitive", and that modern technological "progress" has made us more "civilized", and smarter. Of course that is just ridiculous. (God, I love the movie Hairspray!) I am sure that African tribes have been and are more civilized than our "modern" mainstream culture. We run around the world killing people and telling everyone else what to do like a big fat dumb bully.

You can see this ideology of racial superiority reflected in museum exhibits. Have you ever walked through one of those "halls of civilization" that takes you through "man's" progress through time? I went through a narrow walkway in a museum once that began with a window displaying an African gourd, used as a noisemaker during dancing, placed beside a modern baby rattle. Gee, what is the connection between those two objects? Both used by undeveloped people? It went downhill from there, ending with the triumph of modern civilization, technology. There we were, the smiling heterosexual white couple, our 2.5 kids and our possessions. Kids on school field trips are unconsciously absorbing these messages, making meaning of it deep within their subjective mindsets. I am pretty sure there is no critique in the classroom when they return. This is how we learn unconscious racism. We don't even know it happens. As adults we don't even know we are racist.

Maybe being a good white girl (a "good patient") also keeps us good oppressors. We dutifully take in the museum, treat it reverently, like it holds The Truth about civilization, see ourselves on top of the pile and we are pleased. Hell! Why would we question that?

Everything is Shaking

Don't you
feel it ? ?
?
vibrating
out
of sync
un.

dis. irr.
ryth.
mic.
un reg

u lar
u!
u!

watch me

stut
ter, shut ter
s s shake

beautifully posing languidly self- possessed in your pure air surrounded by calm weather

c
caught

off
plan off

ba
lance
the

thetrees draw

me
up .

ward