So I think I feel like opening up my creative-non-fiction box again. As a run-up I'm posting some old thoughts as well...
"So die Minuten are feminine because women take up lots of time. [Laura didn't think this concept was funny] Plants are feminine cuz they don't talk, so they kinda represent the ideal female. And die Fragen are feminine because girls are really confusing."
Tim: "Someone has to take a firm stance on the total depravity of girls."
I walked out of class and the sky was heavy grey, bulbous and oppressive. I ran to get my camera to try to capture the smell, the weight, the overwhelming power of the storm, but I missed it somehow. I wasn't using the right tools. Images. I went to the top of Dale Hall Tower to try to get the scope. Reflected lights in the room kept tainting the sky. I was trying to catch lightning on the horizon but it eluded me, flashing its defiance, the bright streaks uncaught by the lens. I was trying to catch the raindrops splashing on the sidewalk, large wet tears that scatter on the cement awash with color. I couldn't capture it.
On the first of February I had summer plans for South America. By mid-February I was applying to teach English in St. Petersburg. Last week I decided I'm staying here.
Four harps harmonized "Let it be." It was the first time I'd ever appreciated the Beatles.
I had lunch with a member of the European parliament, an English Baroness. She believed that Turkey should join the EU and will once they implement the thousands of laws required. She spoke of corrupt elections in Russia, the death penalty, Russian aggression, widespread corruption in the handling of EU foreign aid, and the differences of interests and power between France and Germany; between the European Parliament and the commissioners. She believed in democracy, the voice of the people; she believed in the EU so much that she switched parties to become an MEP. She believed deeply in right and wrong, and we talked for two hours straight. The EU is for staving off the clouds of war.
A flurry of Cellos spinning deepsound.
At youth we sang "I'll Fly Away" slow, clouded, and cold. A friend lost a mother.
McCarthy trials in the faded 1954 papers. A storm of ink and rhetoric: Brown vs. Board was an asterisk, but don't worry, the South will rise again; don't worry, here in Oklahoma it won't affect your kids; don't worry, we don't have these problems in Los Angeles. The governors of Georgia and Arkansas vow that this won't happen in their states, and South Carolina explores the option of privatizing all of their schools. The New York Times assures Americans that equal laws do not mean that we were created equal. An uneasy silence. France is losing its grip on Vietnam. It looks like we assassinated some populist leaders in Guatemala. The Reds say that Gone with the Wind is a racist film. A Michigan Senator proposes the insertion of "Under God" into the pledge. "All communists would oppose it...97% [of Americans] believe in God." Soviet dictionary definition as reported: "Benevolence--In bourgeois society private material aid extended to the poor in a hypocritical manner which insults the dignity of man; benevolence is one of the masks behind which is hidden the exploiting nature of the bourgeoisie."
"Heroes from the West, we don't know you, we know best." Sometimes your enemies see you most clearly.
The Tulsa race riots in late 1921 left hundreds of African-Americans dead and a much of Tulsa was wrecked. When Natasha Trethewey's parents wanted to get married in Gulfport, they went to Ohio. According to the eyes of the government, her mother was black and her father was Canadian, and so their marriage was banned in Mississippi. This was after the Civil Rights movement, and she spoke of the narrative of the tragic South, the Civil War, lying between her parents as a cross burned in the yard. The South shall rise again; and what does this sound like to African-Americans? I wonder, hearing the ghosts of Gulfport, what hidden histories lie in Pensacola's past. I remember hearing of riots at Woodham in the 1970s. Norman was a sundown town: Don't be around after sunset if you're black, posted at the edge of town. I have heard that the Nazis cited American success in their treatment of Native Americans as evidence that their "final solution" for the Jews could be successful. Most of the laws passed in 1936 were designed to make the distinction: Jews are not Germans.
Demetria MartÃnez read a short piece on what she was calling "Sanctuary II." College students saving the lives of illegals lost in the desert. Discarded water bottles and strollers. "The life of a poor foreigner depends on speech." Translation errors can mean deportation, misdiagnosis, or hatred.
At youth we played "Identity." I was Shakira, Princess Jasmine, Yoshi, and myself.
Despite the fact that the 1970s hipster personifications of individualism were exaggerated and perhaps pop, the social critique levelled at the male species in The Stepford Wives was killer. Would you trade real relationship, real otherness, for something you could control? We do this so often with God and girls. Do you want a partner or a playtoy? Why do men make all the plans?
Plants are the ideal feminine because they don't speak. Things that don't speak can't express emotion. Things that don't speak can't express difference, disagreement, or self. Really I don't know that it's guys and girls that are so complicated, it's that gulf between individual selves compounded by our fears of otherness and rejection complicated by those bonds that entangle us. I realized that I'd been treating you as an extension of myself for quite some time. It was safer that way, it was terrible...everything you were to me swallowed up in an idea in my head.
Images. Computer screens, and my friends are sitting in the same room as me on the other side of the world. Once again we are sitting on opposite sides of the stream, unaware and separate. Or painfully aware. "You cut me open." Identity. I wonder about relationships, about the politics and emotions of being "just friends." Ben's eyes welled up too I think when "Chasing Cars" came on. I've been meaning to ask him about that. I don't know what the point of falling in love is, or maybe I've just done it all wrong. The First Single Valentine's day I wanted to dance with a stranger, I'm not sure why. I'm not sure what I need to do. For closure.
An uneasy silence. Pizzas. My co-workers are from the DRC, Colombia, Cameroun, China, Korea, Japan--and the other half are from here in the states. Ryan's here, and it feels like something lost is back again, a group. We speak of bonds, borrowing against the nation's future. Philosophies and farm subsidies. Brynnan's quiet, but she knows how to drive a combine, mowing down rows of grain. She wants to paint and work in museums. Danny is going to learn how to dismantle bombs for the Air Force. I found out from a stranger that my sister applied to OU. I wonder where we're all going.
I figured out that it's not so much the fact that God would allow or even bring about war and slaughter that bothers me. I mean, it bothers me a lot, but I don't expect to understand everything about God. It's that we try to explain it that bothers me. This cheapens death. This cheapens the reality that things are not as they should be. I see this in the church too, and I think that it's important to remember that none of us really have it all together, that we're all falling, fallen. My dad and I are trying to figure out what we're gonna do when we grow up.
I buy poetry and bread but at this point I run out of money. I bought too many groceries and I was having trouble getting on my bike until a man offered me a ride. After church I said "God bless you" to a woman who was, at the time, homeless, and she replied "he already has, he already will, and he already does."
Images:
Homeless.
Illegal.
Unchristian.
Conservative.
Mexican.
Female.
Black.
Am I putting images in your heads? Why? Does anyone really fit these categories? I'm asked to give a definition of what it means to be black. I write half a page of precise definition. This disturbs me. I'm asked what it means to be white? Nothing? It's true, but totally false: there is an American culture, a Western world. Funny thing is that you go into Mexico right next door and that's a different world. Like the Middle East, only less so.
Corey tells me that girls struggle deeply with self-image, measuring up to a standard. Supermoms and worker-moms fighting for their identities. And what of those who don't want to be called mommy? I am curious to note that everyone in my class is wearing jeans besides me, but in spite of this Brittney isn't wearing clothes at the beginning of her last video. My classmates protest that college doesn't count. How many times do we flock to the pretty people? How many times do we write off the girls who have the self-respect not to sell their bodies for popularity? It seems to me that as guys we generally write each other off as not even interesting, as if we had nothing to give one another and had no value. I think this is terribly destructive and isolating.
A storm of colour nearly bowled me over when I went into the Fred Jones Museum of Art. All the Southwestern art, the Native American aesthetics, the bright reds and oranges of the dirt stood in stark contrast to the safe blues and greens of the European landscapes I've seen. Trethewey found a dictionary definition for native that defined a native as someone born into a lower caste, a position of servitude. Someone in Mexico told Tim that there were three types of treatment of natives in Mexico: In one region the Spanish enslaved them, in one region they intermarried with them, and in the last region they slaughtered them. The ritual costumes in the paintings spoke of a different world, an alien world erased by the coming of the white man. Men painted up in zebra stripes, antlers on their heads, dancing frozen, totally silent and still on the canvas, like my voice on this screen. I try to capture a month of conversations, images, thoughts, and feelings and it is beyond me. "Peoples is peoples." Peoples like you, even when they're nothing like you. I hope you get that in what I'm saying. May we learn to love our neighbors more than we love ourselves.
"You treat me like I'm blind. Setting fires around houses on the hill. But light gives heat. You segregate my mind, burning crosses from your fears...
Would You teach us how to love?"
