At a desk covered in objects — stacks of papers and books; horizontal arrays of napkins, paper clips, highlighters markers and pens — I sit and work: teach, meet, read, write, converse with students. Around and behind me, dense stacks of books and records, artifacts that store and transmit stories and histories, recordings of events, theories, philosophies. From these, I build my teachings, dialogical investigations of life through study of literature. The America revealed in this literature is a place filled with stories of injustice and resistance. Conquest, slavery, wage slavery. And like a thread run through it, the revolution, the ongoing one, the perennial one, the fights for freedom, equality, love among all persons and joy to the world. The works we read and discuss implicate us — as victims, as perpetrators, oftentimes as both — in a violent, fascist, capitalist-imperialist, patriarchal settler-colonialist system of domination — a system radically at odds with the future integrity of Earth as biosphere.
Tag: Books
Saturday February 29, 2020
What are we to make of Tommy Orange’s There There, with its story of a Powwow interrupted by violence? Why is that the event where the book’s interlinked narratives connect? Orange is a member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma, as is his character Dene Oxendene, a young documentary filmmaker collecting stories from Native people in his hometown. Dene is thus a version of Orange himself, allowing the novelist to comment metafictionally about the politics of representing one’s community, particularly when one is a member of an oppressed people. Can the one allow the many to speak? Can the many speak through the one?
Tuesday February 18, 2020
Back to Aldous Huxley’s Island, with its Pacific island utopia, the society of Pala, intact despite the “conspiracy” narrative that weaves through it like Muchalinda, the King of Snakes, whose tree the Buddha is said to have sat under. The lesson, we might say, is that “People who aren’t frightened of snakes, people who don’t approach them with the fixed belief that the only good snake is a dead snake, hardly ever get bitten” (239). For Muchalinda cares for the Buddha, shelters the Tathagatha “from the wind and the rain” (238) for the duration of his sitting. Huxley offers the story as a eupsychian alternative to the West’s Eden narrative. Each of us is an island and a world — like Turtle Island — and our time here can be blissful, saved by the Third Noble Truth if we so allow that there is a cure. The prescription for this easing of suffering is laid out in the Buddha’s Eightfold Path. Each of us has within our grasp the power to live as do the Palanese — because each of us is the Shipwrecked Westerner washed up on Pala’s shores like Island‘s protagonist Will Farnaby. If Will can be educated and changed by his encounter with Pala, then so can we. So can all of us. Microcosmic resistance can have observable macrocosmic effects. Millennials outnumber boomers. Go, Bernie, go! Let us put our educations to practice and change the world. “War is over, if you want it,” as John and Yoko sang, with backing vocals by the Harlem Community Choir. No more war on Natives, migrants, women, children, workers, planet. No more war on ourselves.
Thursday February 13, 2020
A friend puts his house up for sale — a beautiful old craftsman, sizeable enough for a small family. We schedule a viewing and prepare ourselves in case we wish to make an offer. A bin full of discarded library architecture books turns up earlier in the day at Goodwill, including books from the 60s and 70s by Lawrence Halprin and Paolo Soleri.
Saturday February 8, 2020
Modernist art and literature gain viability — become possible — only when there are social movements afoot vying for control of the production of reality. Such was the argument Marshall Berman made in his book All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, is it not? (Book out of reach, I settle for Berman’s essay of that name.) He complains early in his essay of “primitivist romance” among his fellow former SDSers following the latter’s disintegration in 1969. He accuses these former comrades of nihilism and anti-Americanism. Berman’s views are silly; I bore quickly of his rash judgments. His admiration for Marx’s “developmentalism” leaves him cold to the pleas of Indigenous resistance movements and anti-colonialists like Fanon. Berman is no ally to those of us who demand an end to the money-form. His humanism excludes from its circle of care nonhuman relatives and kin.
Sunday February 2, 2020
Here I am, new to parenting, preparing a talk on pedagogy. What do I take as lessons from the one for the other? Both involve sound and space and movement. I dance around the room, whether it be the classroom or the living room, encouraging recognition of conditions of experience held in common, resummoning along the way history as an epic poem recited anew at every moment. In the classroom, there’s some of what Gregory Bateson discusses in Steps To an Ecology of Mind (though it’s there, too, perhaps, in my work as a parent). Spread across the early pages of Bateson’s book are a series of “metalogues”: metaphysical dialogues between a daughter and her father. Bateson defined the metalogue as “a conversation about some problematic subject” (1), though he stipulates that the conversation reflect as well on itself and its structure, hence the “meta.” That, I think, is akin to what I do as a teacher. It’s akin, as well, to what M.C. Richards does in her book Centering. Like Bateson, Richards introduces Centering as “interdisciplinary” — though Bateson says his book earns this description not just by exchanging information between and across pairs of disciplines “but in discovering patterns common to many.” The worlds rendered by the disciplines fall short of the one known by holists like Richards and Bateson.
Friday January 31, 2020
Evenings are sometimes emotionally exhausting, baby crying, wordless work. Hardly an opportune moment for spontaneous prose. The sight of the ceiling fan calms and consoles her. Perhaps the fan functions as an ideogram representing person as many-membered being, poised in the middle of the ceiling, floating there like a lotus-flower atop an upside-down pond. When she falls asleep, I sit around wondering about Hell’s Angels and their place in the counterculture of the 1960s. I scan my shelves for books by Hunter S. Thompson, his book Hell’s Angels somewhere out of reach. Charles Olson interrupts with his essay “Projective Verse.”
Sunday January 26, 2020
Baby strokes my Adam’s apple as I burp her over my shoulder. I wrap her in my arms and prepare to step outdoors. These are our doings, our joys. We go for a walk. We see the world. Exploration of outer space. How does one respond to one’s country having landed on the moon? What modifications occur to our myths and our cognitive maps? Anne Kent Rush ventured a guess with her 1976 book Moon, Moon, wherein she quotes the old Chinese maxim, “Love everything in the universe, because the Sun and Moon and Earth are but one body.” Let us strive for a state of pure and fearless openness to all things.
Saturday January 25, 2020
Each day we invent new terms of affection for her: Buddha nugget, snuggle bunny, astral glow worm. We march through the neighborhood en masse, forming spontaneously around ourselves a people’s patrol. I picture as our avatars the toughs from Double Dragon. Afterwards I stand outdoors reading Thoreau on wild fruits. I take breaks and dip into Sherry L. Smith’s Hippies, Indians & the Fight for Red Power, a book that references an angry 1978 review-essay by Leslie Marmon Silko accusing Gary Snyder of “cultural imperialism.” Snyder’s book Turtle Island won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1975. It’s a book I wish to teach alongside the Silko essay the next time I teach American Literature.
Wednesday January 22, 2020
Arrived home from work, I go for a short walk around my neighborhood and stare up at trees full of red-chested robins. More than a dozen robins at varying heights above my head. They talk: I listen. Rustles of leaves and feathers, cheery tweets, blissful songs. Beatitudes performed for me, or at least tolerant of my listening. Performed first by the birds and then afterwards electronically, by a car that pulls up beside a park, bass sounds reverberating outward even with the car’s windows rolled up. That’s what I like, something suburbs often lack: neighborhoods with music (especially when the latter is of a spontaneous or locally improvised sort). When I return home, I sit and hold her, marveling and rejoicing, struck with a sense of beatitude as I behold my daughter. One day I wish to read Windblown World: The Journals of Jack Kerouac 1947-1954. “I promise I shall never give up, and that I’ll die yelling and laughing,” Kerouac wrote in an entry in the book from 1949. “And that until then I’ll rush around this world I insist is holy and pull at everyone’s lapel and make them confess to me and to all.” Always and forever I’m filled with the awareness of countless books unread. From Kerouac to Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov to Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe.
Trance-Scripts 