whetstone

balloon

2010-04-23T18:02:00.006-04:00

This is a true story.

A ten year old girl let go a balloon in Northern England
bearing her name and her address.
It traveled a hundred miles south, against the prevailing wind,
to the hand of another ten year old girl
with exactly the same name.
Of all the chances, of all the random currents of air,
it flew straight into the hands of the one
who didn’t even know she was waiting for it.

A statistician, hearing the story, says that
something like this was bound to happen
to someone
eventually.

Poetry is like that.
Set a poem loose in the world and it wanders
losing itself in the ocean
falling in a stream, catching in a tree
but sometimes coming to exactly the right place.

It's bound to happen eventually,
and every time is a miracle.

When the words find the one
who doesn’t even know she is waiting for them,
in that instant,
two chubby hands a hundred miles or years apart
hold tight to the string of the same balloon.

above the tree line

2009-12-08T18:47:00.004-05:00

Plants here have roots as deep as I am tall
with less than a pinkie’s length of shrubby leaves
and tiny flowers to show for it.

And you’d think it would be snow
that keeps you away in winter –
but really it’s the wind.
Even gentle snowflakes scour the ground bare.

The snow that stays here remembers a time
before men first filled the air with coal dust, and
oh, it could tell you stories –
but it guards its silence in curved shadows,
sullen and unmelting.

Even in spring the colors breathe autumn.
Orange lichens and fast-moving shadows
brush their fingers over land you would swear,
from post cards,
was soft as velveteen.

Here the spirit yearns to rush over the exposed rocks
with their round rainwater mirrors,
longs to glide down the soft-edged hills
toward the jagged peaks far below.

But you can’t run ten yards without gasping.

The air conceals its thinness with a mendacious clarity.
The doors of distance are unlocked, every direction thrown wide open.

Everything is sharp as crystal here, everything is clear as glass –
here it’s all as unreachable as a reflection.

... break your mother's back

2009-07-08T00:04:00.004-04:00

when I was an angry little girl
filled with the pressing, helpless rage particular to children
I would look for fissures in the sidewalk to step on
stamping my small foot hard
secure, even at that age, in the falseness of the superstition

but this morning my mother, shrunk now to human size
lay down on the surgeon's table to bare her spine to the knife.

cutting first from the back and then from the front
for nine hours the doctors fought
to put what was wrong right again

in a far off city, I went to work as usual
almost as old now as she was then
but filled once more with the same orphaned powerlessness

all the way from 15th Street to 54th and back
I did not step on a single crack.

bubble

2009-06-26T11:47:00.000-04:00

We say the bubble has popped
when dreams have shattered
or illusions have been broken.

But watch one do it in slow motion --
first it bends to accept the pinpoint thrust
then unpeels from that spot like an opening eyelid
a herd of droplets galloping away along the retreating edge
like a wave crest in reverse.

The beauty of a bubble is not
its symmetrical balance of complementary and opposing forces.
It's the inevitable moment the perfect sphere disintegrates.

When a bubble bursts I don't see abandoned hope.
I see a prisoner set free at last, a captive breath
released into the waiting arms of the open air.

Fate

2009-06-05T18:11:00.004-04:00

If I were sinking to the bottom
I would be a flat stone, like for skipping.
I would tip from side to side in invisible currents
wobbling my way down to the silt.

Even in this extremity
even in the face of the absolute final outcome
I would be ambivalent.

“Shall I strike with this side or with that
before coming to my predetermined rest
in a puff of sand?”

In my petrified mind this would matter
intensely.

I would tilt back and forth, wildly indecisive
knowing all along that the angle of my future repose
was already determined by the slant of the sand.

We can’t choose our fate –
only the manner of our going to it.
Do we struggle and equivocate
or seek the swiftest, surest path to the end?

a poem for the new president

2009-01-21T16:15:00.006-05:00

Not Atlas

Don't ask him to be the suffering giant,
bearing the weight of the world on his back.
Don't ask him to support us, carry us,
be our cradle and anchor, the seat of the earth.

He is not Atlas: don't ask him to hold up the sky.

It's easy to mistake the man for the future he points to,
but he isn't the Titan. He is only

an atlas, a book of maps,
showing us as best he can where we are,
the geography of where we must go.

pearl

2008-04-04T10:41:00.004-04:00

No one asks the oyster if it wants to make a pearl.

The sand comes in

uninvited.

The oyster does the only thing it can to protect its quivering, salty, delicate flesh.

It excretes layers of iridescence, moist rainbows,

an accretion of moonlight.

I think all beauty is something like this –

un-chosen, necessary

holding something sharp in its heart.

birds

2007-03-23T13:33:00.000-04:00

When the birds came to town the order of the universe was upset. There was fear and resentment, and whisperings in all the alleys. The grandmothers, the sweepers, complained about the feathers which drifted into multicolored piles in all the corners, even though the birds were doing their best to be polite.

In the beginning there were only a few, and it’s hard to say why they came. We never had any before. They peered through the keyhole of the moon, I guess, they looked at our town and saw that it was good, they came in ones and twos to test the branches of the trees for comfort and sturdiness, and turned their faces toward the sea. There must be some magic in the wet air, or the salt, because the firstcomers became more brilliant, and the sounds they made in their throats softened into bell tones and chuckles like a running brook. They are now the cellists of the heavens. And the skies filled with new cacklers, grey-bodied shriekers, come by the thousands to sit in that eerie crowd and watch the light over the water.

Even the deaf could recognize a new migration because of the color of the feather piles. In the spring when the new flocks arrived the tones suddenly shifted to neutrals, and over the course of the warmer season those dull colors refracted in our good sea light into a rainbow of outlandish brilliance. What was once a family of dull mauve clickers turned into an iridescent purplish clan of brilliant percussionists; their tiny clicks became as intricate as a drummer keeping 11/11 time with one hand and 12/12 time with the other.

Why the resentment, you may ask. Isn’t a thing of beauty a joy for ever? Shouldn’t the increase of beauty be the multiplication of joy, the magnification of grace, shouldn’t it lift the heart and soothe the spirit? Well, imagine, I ask you: imagine the silent sky of the morning, and the pale lift of dawn, that magic time when everything is hushed and expectant. Picture the moments when there seem to be enough space for the delicate dream thoughts to rush and expand, when the world opens up and lets you in.

But now, those birds! Birds with their sensitive eyes and delicate slumbers, they felt the sun coming up over the water before we began to stir from our dreams. They started shaking their bright wings and calling their morning greetings to each other. When it was only a few, we could forgive them. But then the cellos began their mourning and the flautists sent up their trills, and the drummers and cymbals chimed in, and before you could rub the sleep from your eyes the whole damn orchestra was out there vying for attention. There was no such thing, anymore, as the peaceful hour at dawn.

The noise continued all day. The grandmothers with their brooms went out into the streets to remove the feathers; they swept and gave each other long-suffering looks. On the outskirts of town there were constant plumes of smoke, where the feathers were burned. You sometimes saw a brilliant green flash, an emerald’s wink, a feather that rose up over the flames in the column of smoke to dance and twirl in the heat. But the fire always got them in the end.

At the beginning some of the women collected the feathers and sewed them into dresses, or used them to decorate their hair. The men made masculine belts and some of them experimented with crests, but in the end it was not enough. Crests are lovely on a jay, but no man managed to make one look equally dashing. The birds grew more and more brilliant, and more and more numerous, and their shedding was too much for the most ardent seamstress to stay ahead of. But the really unconscionable thing is that the feathers that fell were never quite as radiant as the ones still on the birds. By the time you finished a dress, even the piles of trash in the streets outshone you.

The birds averted their eyes from the pyres. They tried to speak more melodiously and fly more gracefully. They put all their effort into delighting our senses. They were a tribe of artists in training, learning from each other, each one more accomplished and more musical, more athletic and luminous, than the last.

But we despised them. Their polite gazes, the turn of their heads as they observed us, the serene satisfaction that hovered around their beaked faces as they fluffed and preened and grew steadily more lovely – it was unbearable.

In the end we decided that something must be done. We stayed up late at night, tiptoed through the alleys with shielded lanterns, and gathered in the church. The decision was made. We took saws and rakes, hammers, baseball bats, we armed ourselves with whatever was handy, and we went out to the stand of trees that lay between the town and the sea, where all the birds were snoring melodiously.

And then we began. We hacked at the trees with axes, the women raised their voices in animal screams. For once we disturbed their sleep. The birds roused themselves from their brilliant dreams in shock, an animated fluttering, even their cries of alarm were harmonious. A few fell, and to them we were merciless. But the rest took off from the trees in a glorious rush of wings and they flew blind into the night. There was a shower of feathers that were shaken loose, the last feathers thank God, the last ones that would fall.

We didn’t watch them go. We were busy with the trees. We tore them down, their sad crumpled roots pulled from the earth. There couldn’t be a home for the birds to return to, a place that would attract them again.

Since then the wind that blows from across the sea strikes the village more harshly, and the smell it carries with it seems somehow changed. Maybe it’s because the trees stood between us and the ocean. The light too, once all the gleaming plumes were finally cleared from all the corners, seems softer. Lovers venture out at dawn to walk together on the quiet sands, listening to the waves – and even though the whispering of leaves is missing, the lovers are once again filled with the silence of the morning sky, able to be absorbed completely by each other.

Women look a little more tired in the new, paler light. But then again, they no longer suffer by comparison. Once again it is possible that a lovely girl might be the finest thing to see for miles around. The men start gossiping about the pretty ones with what seems like relief – they can compare one to the natural world without casting her in the shade. Her hair like the golden sea grass in the wind, her skin like the inside of a polished shell, her eyes like an early summer twilight. No one mentions the birds.

But I have a secret. When the last piles of feathers were burned, when we were gathering them up in our hands and throwing them on the fire like confetti, I put one in my pocket. It’s not very long, its shape is a little rounded. It’s a worker feather from the middle of the wing, not one of the decorative ones. I hung it in the attic, where the light from the little round window comes in and makes the dust dance off the floor. It moves slowly in breezes too faint for me to feel.

Sometimes I go upstairs to look at it, and each time it seems that the colors have changed – I could swear that it started out a caramel color, but day by day I feel it is shifting, pulling in more light. It has traceries of fire running along its edges, it reflects the blue of the sky into something more brilliant, it has veins of amethyst and lapis shadows and when the spring comes it turns bright beetle-shell green. It is every color that vanished when the birds left.

I can hardly stand to look at it. In the end, I still can’t decide what lies heavier on the heart: unbearable, exquisite beauty; or the memories it leaves in passing, ripples in the wake of its loss.

spending beyond our means

2006-08-04T17:00:00.000-04:00

I’ve been reading about consumer debt in the United States. Our insatiable appetite for cheap borrowing has resulted in many Americans mortgaging their houses to pay for expensive toys. A country without much of a past, we now seem incapable of thinking about the future; our minds focused on endless desiring, the infinite now.

So sign us up for big screen TVs, for cruises and a new car every two years; what’s the matter with a new set of golf clubs, with another pair of shoes, a breakfast nook and a new bay window? Don’t we need a new grill, a riding lawn mower, a faster computer, a digital video recorder? It seems to me that our lives have become so suffused with work that we now believe that the good life has be purchased, instead of lived.

Reading these stories, about people with such a hunger for a different life that they borrow without any possibility of repaying, made me think about our foreign policy.

It seems to me that Americans have a tendency to buy things pitched to us by charlatans. In 2002, the vast majority of us approved of a war to remove Saddam Hussein. Gulf War II sounded good to us! The first one was fun and besides we already knew who the bad guy was.

The emotion that led us there was not unjustified – the 9/11 attacks on American soil were deeply unsettling, and the country longed for a return to safety. But we transferred that legitimate desire to an unrelated thing. It’s something like a mother that misses spending time with her husband and children, who channels that unvoiced desire onto a Viking stove. The stove represents cooking, meals together, shared time gathered at the hearth. But buying objects that represent unfulfilled needs traps us in the very life that was depriving us. We have to keep working to pay the growing bills, and while we are busy the stove gathers dust.

Unfortunately the American people failed to take account of the APR on our National Credibility Card. It looks like the rate’s variable. Iraq is ours now, and the cost of this impulse purchase will just keep going up.

But as Americans usually are, I am optimistic. Frugality and delaying gratification used to be a source of pride in this country. This is my prayer: when we get out of this hole we’ve dug for ourselves, may we as a nation have finally learned to read the fine print.

(I got the stove = family time image from a book I read or an article somewhere, but I can’t remember what it was. If anyone comes across it please let me know so I can give proper credit.)

opium dreams

2006-06-23T17:49:00.000-04:00

This is an e-mail I sent to a friend. I hope he doesn't mind that I've put it here!

I have been thinking about religion and pain. There was an article in the New York Times magazine recently about a woman who had a problem with chronic pain. She was part of a pain management study, where the therapists sought to teach people how to decrease their pain sensations. For the woman who wrote the article, she could alter how much pain she felt by imagining herself as a religious martyr, a victim of the Inquisition. This image helped her to activate her brain’s natural pain-blocking ability.

So strong religious conviction, or even the imagination of it, has the ability to stop suffering. You know Karl Marx’s famous comment, that “religion is the opiate of the masses”? He meant that religion is the thing that takes them away from reality and sets them dreaming. In his mind, it was not a good thing. But the opium poppy has two uses. Heroin destroys the minds and bodies of its users, drives them to commit crimes, ruins their families. But morphine has the miraculous ability to take away unbearable pain. It’s impossible to say whether the opium poppy is good or evil, it simply is. How you use it determines which face it will show to you.

I think that religion is exactly the same way. I think that religion is often used as a palliative, to ameliorate pain. A few weeks ago, I was walking in the subway and I came across a group of young black men, dressed in robes with the Star of David on them. One was speaking, and calling out Bible verse numbers, and another would read the named verse in a loud voice. I have heard about these groups, who believe that blacks, and not Jews, are the “Chosen People” mentioned in the Christian Bible. They are sometimes on TV but I have never seen them in the flesh, so I stopped to listen.

Mostly when religious people are yelling in a public place, New Yorkers ignore them. So naturally, the one who was speaking and calling verses began addressing his speech to me. Mostly he seemed focused on proving that the “Israelites” in the Bible are black. He would ask for a verse, and when it was read, explain how to interpret it, or simply emphasize something in the text.

Religion in all its forms interests me, but when one claims to apply exclusively to one racial group, of course I smell a rat. I began asking questions. I didn’t want to fight with the speaker, but I wanted to clarify what he was saying. So I asked whether the Bible, in his opinion, had anything to say to white people. He answered me that according to the Book whites would be made to pay for the sins of our ancestors, who enslaved the “black Israelites,” by being enslaved and killed ourselves. This, to him, was the justice of God.

He was careful to point out that merely being born after the crimes were committed against the Africans who were brought here in slavery was not enough to excuse me, and that the sins of my fathers were passed to me in the blood. I asked him if there was nothing whites could do to expunge their guilt, and he was triumphant when he told me “nothing.”

I told him that he seemed very pleased, for someone who was delivering a death sentence to someone who had not harmed him personally. And he just smiled and answered that yes, he was pleased, because he was one of the “Chosen.”

I found this encounter highly disturbing, because it was my first personal taste of how my Book can be twisted. Of course I knew that the Bible has “justified” all sorts of prejudice and horror, but it’s different to have that prejudice look at you in the face. It’s the first time I had a visceral understanding of how a Muslim might see the beheading videos from Iraq, people reading from the Qur’an and then pulling out their knives. What makes it so horrifying is not just that their acts are evil, but that they use something precious to justify them.

Suicide bombing is a less obvious case, because the bomber is so deluded as to be willing to die in commission of his crime. The poor fools who use their bodies as weapons are like heroin addicts, drunk on beautiful visions, running from suffering to the only thing that they think will make it go away. They are not blameless, and what they do is evil, but it is most important to find out what causes their suffering, and repair the problem at its source.

Real life is more than beautiful enough to compete with an opium dream, if you can pay true attention to it, if outside pressure doesn’t make you bitter and filled with anger. And the peddlers of sick, hate-filled religion should be ashamed of themselves, just like any other drug pusher. They prey on the desperate and the weak-minded, and sell only illusions.

exhaustion

2006-05-01T16:27:00.000-04:00

One of my friends was telling me a story about filling jars with objects of different sizes. If you fill it with large stones, then with pebbles, then with sand, and finally with water, it is “full” at each stage, and yet continues to accept more. Try this operation in reverse order, however, and as you can imagine you won’t get very far.

As a metaphor for life, this means that if you don’t put the “big” things in first, you will never have room for them. I guess those large things are different for each person, but in my case I have long known that one of them is time to be alone and unhurried. Somehow, that knowledge slips away from me, though, and I find myself frantically running from meeting to work to appointment to date to telephone conversation with no space in between, no rest, no peace. I couldn’t even find time to write a short post on this blog.

And then this Friday I hit the wall. I didn’t want to talk to people, read anything, work, or eat. By the end of the day I was so exhausted that I couldn’t even imagine going to my belly dance class, no matter that I had stayed up late washing things to wear there. On the way home I stopped in the cigar shop to thank my Yemeni friends for helping one of my coworkers out (she needed pictures of tobacco products for an article). They had a huge bag of bread that someone’s sister in Brooklyn had baked, hard and round, with whole cumin seeds scattered through it and corn flour mixed in. They used to give them to me last Ramadan when I was fasting. I took two, went home, and sat in the back garden slowly drinking a cup of sweet tea and breaking the crusts off with my fingers. The night was still warm, no wind because of the high walls around me, no other people outside. Bliss.

In the end just giving myself permission this weekend to do nothing, meant that I didn’t have to. I did go to belly dance on Saturday, filling my body with a wave of “ gold endorphin light,” and drank a beautiful cappuccino standing up in an Italian-style espresso bar in midtown. I stayed in Union Square park next to a fountain with four drooling lion heads (they really do need to turn the water pressure up) and watched the brilliant light come through a swath of red tulips planted at head height.

That night I started a photography project I’ve been turning over in my head for months (more about that later, when I have something to show) and went out to celebrate the time I’ve spent with a friend who is leaving soon for three months of travel and then medical school.

Sunday was full of sleep, a very late lunch, and hours in a community garden, sitting in silence with a beautiful woman and her pet rabbit Toby. I had met her before, and liked her before, and sat quietly with her before -- I guess it is not the company of people that tires me but only the requirement of talking to them.

The large stone of silence and motionlessness, added first to the jar of my days, makes me feel curiously light and open, and suddenly adding in smaller things felt less like a burden and more like a balance. Why is it so hard to remember this? How many times must I have an epiphany before the shiny newness and wide-eyed surprise wears off, and the concept becomes part of my everyday knowledge?

civility

2006-02-14T17:26:00.000-05:00

I’ve been thinking, and arguing, about the Muhammad cartoons for the last month. Fortunately I have friends on either side of the debate, and since I don’t agree with any of them, it’s been useful -- nothing like taking fire from both sides to really figure out what you think. When my overseas Muslim friends first started talking about the cartoons I was dismissive. Looking at the images online I knew I had seen similar jokes at Christianity’s expense. If it didn’t bother me when I was the butt of the joke, why were they so angry?

Two things changed my first opinion. One was finding out that the Jyllands-Posten was less a champion of free speech than a hypocritical right-wing rag, which rejected caricatures of Jesus three years ago because they would offend readers.

The second was an IM conversation with a Moroccan friend of mine. He was hurt and offended by the cartoons, and I was trying to explain that freedom of expression must explicitly protect offensive speech. In talking to him about the decision to publish the cartoons, I realized that there’s been a conflation of two kind of rules, the rule of law and the requirements of good manners.

I do not want legislation protecting religious figures from satire. But the right to offend carries responsibility. I have a right to criticize the dress or lifestyle choices of my next-door neighbor, but I had better have a damned good reason to do so beyond the desire to demonstrate my freedom of expression. If we’re going to violate the most deeply held sensitivities of a group of people, shouldn’t we be getting something of value out of it? Because after I've had my say, the next morning my neighbor is still going to be right next door.

I see nothing coming from this provocation but (absolutely inexcusable) property damage and loss of life, and a justified, and very damaging, boycott of Danish products. So what was the purpose? To show that you can corral uneducated bigots on both sides into extreme positions?

You can’t legislate politeness. But you can criticize people who violate its rules.

The Jyllands-Posten had an absolute right to publish those cartoons. But they should not have. All the bloviating about Muslim hypocrisy (it’s true, anti-Semitic cartoons are common in the Middle East) does not change the fact that this editorial decision was rude, intentionally provocative, and most inexcusable of all, ineffective.

The Case For Contamination

2006-01-13T15:49:00.001-05:00

This article, by Kwame Anthony Appiah, inspired me to start thinking about tolerance and pluralism. In thinking about it, I noticed that I seem to have a very similar argument over and over. The strange thing is that similarity of background is not a good predictor of agreement. I find more commonality on this subject with an Iraqi I talk to over the internet than I do with American acquaintances of mine.

Here’s an example of the repeating argument. I was fighting with one of the people who used to live in my house about immigration. My fundamental position is: I like it. Even illegals don’t bother me. This is not an economic position, but an emotional one, and I know that unless perfect justice exists in the world unrestricted immigration isn’t feasible. But the thought of waves of immigrants coming to this country is simply exciting to me.

My former roommate’s opinion was that illegal immigrants should be thrown out, that immigration control and enforcement should be tightened, that government-supported bilingual information lines and forms should be discontinued. So it goes without saying that we were unable to come to an agreement.

Finally, he said in disgust, “If you lived 500 years, and gradually the American language turned to Spanish, and all your customs were swept away, you wouldn’t care.” The tone of his voice made it clear that he was describing an abhorrent situation. But my immediate reaction was, “That’s exactly right.” But my own culture is precious to me, as is my country. I want to live according to my ideas of what is right, and I love the image of America I was taught in elementary school: a land of freedom, the fair rule of law, equal opportunity, and justice.

But if the majority of citizens of that country choose, in the future, to enshrine the cuckoo as the national bird, speak Esperanto, and worship Hostess Ding Dongs, more power to them. The centrality of my identity as an “American” has nothing to do with the ethnic trappings of culture at all. I cannot deny other Americans the right to the same freedoms I claim for myself, because to me being “American” is an ideology and not an ethnicity.

The thought that is so beautifully argued in the article, (which I link to again because it is well worth reading) is this: cultures are not pure. They are not sacred. And they do not have a right to exist. They will mix, shift, cast off old traditions, create or borrow new ones. And lived culture (distinct from cultural arts and languages) is only valuable to the extent that it appeals to the people who are a part of it. My culture is good for me, but I have no authority to tell others to ascribe to any part of it. My right is to live as I wish, as long as I don’t impinge others’ ability to do the same.

This means that I should be very tolerant. But in practice, sometimes when I have had these arguments, I sense myself stiffening up with an absolute inflexibility. Something in the discussion makes me hard and unmoving, and it’s very uncomfortable. There is an apparent inconsistency there. That is where Appiah’s article interests me so. It clarified for me that it is when I encounter an unwillingness to allow others this freedom that I claim for myself, that I discover my uncompromising core. Be it a discussion of family law, or national dress, gay rights, the establishment of an official language: anything that seems to impose a set of values that apply to all people gets my back up.

The most important point in the article, to me, is a simple one. There is no ideology, no culture, no language, on which we can legitimately ask all the people of the world to agree. Therefore, the only way we will learn to get on together is to get used to each other. Get used to living next to, among, people whose ideas and practices we could never accept for ourselves.

That’s why, as a tolerant pluralist, there is no contradiction in arguing for universal female suffrage, equal access to education regardless of race or sex, laws that give equal power in marriage and equal requirements for dress, regardless of the fact that some cultures consider any or all of these things abhorrent. Individual liberty is more important than cultural integrity.

But I must accept, for example, that some women have no desire to show their face to any man but their husband. I may vehemently disagree with a culture that requires this of them, but I must allow them the freedom to choose what I would not. That is all that matters. The absolute freedom of the choice.

feminine mystique quantified

2005-12-16T18:01:00.000-05:00

Face recognition software finally gives us the definitive interpretation of La Joconde’s enigmatic expression: 83 per cent happy, 9 per cent disgusted, 6 per cent fearful and 2 per cent angry . Well, it’s good to finally have that cleared up.

My cheery discovery for the day was a protestant German youth group that produced a calendar of scenes from the Bible designed to appeal to young people, like this one:

It is true, biblical images like this one would likely appeal to a youth audience. Conservatives in the States are predictably upset. I say, let’s import German Christians, we need more of that sensibility! I guess the average pastor here doesn’t spend so much time pondering Delilah’s hotness, but she must have been pretty gorgeous to lull Samson into complacency like that. Reminds me of a Leonard Cohen song:

Your faith was strong but you needed proof
You saw her bathing on the roof
Her beauty and the moonlight overthrew you
She tied you to a kitchen chair
She broke your throne, she cut your hair
And from your lips she drew the Hallelujah

And now that I'm on the subject of Cohen, his is perhaps my favorite image of Jesus:

And Jesus was a sailor
When he walked upon the water
And he spent a long time searching
From his lonely wooden tower
And when he knew for certain
Only drowning men could see him
He said:
All men will be sailors then, until the sea shall free them

Cohen's spirituality is appealing to me because it is so heartbroken.

There is a crack, a crack in everything; that’s how the light gets in…

chain (n) 1. a. A connected, flexible series of links, used especially for holding objects together or restraining

2005-12-12T18:17:00.001-05:00

Guinea worm, Ghana. A father watches over his son who is in the process of having the parasite removed from his body. The worm is ingested in contaminated drinking water. Photograph by Brent Stirton.

Or in my case, restraining my attention and exercise of my intellect. I seem to have contracted a disease that involves compulsively clicking on links until I realize that I am, for reasons completely beyond my understanding, in the middle of a search for images of guinea worms. Aside from the obvious ick factor, and despite the fact that I do work as a researcher, there is no reason on earth that I need to see those pictures.

It all starts logically enough. I’m fighting, via IM, with an orthodox Christian friend. He is antagonistic to Islam and has a literal interpretation of the Bible that I yearn to poke holes in. We will get into why that’s a bad impulse that I shouldn’t be indulging in another post. Anyway, I start looking for web resources that back up my point, which is that all the holy books have awful bits and that his selective interpretation of the Qur’an is unfair. The chain of logic goes: Google search for inaccuracies in the Bible —> Skeptic’s Annotated Bible —> Obsessive reading of the long list of verses containing, in the Skeptical authors’ opinion, cruelty —> the Skeptics' guinea worm page —> the aforementioned search for guinea worm images —> a website devoted (with tongue in cheek I assume) to saving the guinea worm, which has been almost totally eradicated by a United Nations program. And it is on the last site, where I have clicked on a link telling me how I can help to preserve the species by hosting one myself, that I realize two things.

1. It has taken me 40 minutes of slack-jawed surfing to get to this page.
2. I must be out of my mind.

These are the symptoms of my disease. Unrestricted access to the internet, a wonderful and enviable resource, has ensnared me in an snarl of links, individually fascinating, but collectively a chain that fetters my attention. I still retain enough free will to do my work, but all that glorious free time I have that could be spent on projects or study is being poured instead into an endless search for irrelevant information.

Anyway, the eradication of the guinea worm, despite its dubious divine provenance ( Numbers 21:6), is a definite and unqualified good thing and I'm glad to know that the fight is going well. It may be mostly broken and corrupt, but I love the United Nations. Take that, Black Helicopter conspiracy theorists.

But what exactly is this black helicopter theory? I'll have to wait 'til tomorrow to Google it, I'm 30 minutes late leaving work as it is.

power

2005-11-16T18:41:00.000-05:00

Pursuing something I have long been interested in, I went to observe a belly dance class at a studio near my work. I wanted to see if I liked the way the teacher moved, and how she interacted with the students. The class assembled, some in standard dance practice attire and others with bejeweled skirts and extravagantly long hair. Women from the advanced class were already warming up, an hour early, lazily rolling on the floor with swords balanced on their heads.

The music was mostly what I had expected, Arabic pop music of the kind that is often played at my ex-boyfriend’s coffee shop. The teacher started to move, showing how to isolate muscles in the back to move the chest forward and out without a corresponding jerk of the shoulders. She demonstrated very exaggerated hand gestures followed by a more liquid motion of the same kind. It was beautiful, and the exaggeration made some of the surreal fluidity I associate with belly dance a little more understandable. Isolating each joint and then moving them, the teacher transformed what seemed a simple set of gestures into a boneless wave.

This is a dance you can’t watch without thinking about sex, even if it isn’t in a pornographic way. The gestures and movements are so profoundly, archetypically female.

Sometime toward the end of the class, the teacher was demonstrating a hip drop, one of the fundamental movements in belly dance. Locking her eyes on the mirror she advanced slowly, the whole class following behind her, torso and hips undulating and head and shoulders strangely still, the fixed eyes hypnotic.

And I don’t know what it was, the music or that crowd of stares, the confidence and unabashed sexiness of what those women were doing, but I began to feel rage. Female power is so often achieved through men. Where they have been the actors in history, we were reduced to these bodies, objects of desire, the rocks they wreck themselves on. Watching those women I wanted that power for myself, wanted to be Helen of Troy, to have beauty that is terrifying. And at the same time, I felt ashamed by the smallness of that desire.

As Mary Wollstonecraft said: Taught from infancy that beauty is woman's sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.

convers(at)ion

2005-11-08T18:08:00.000-05:00

The Yemenis who work at the convenience store I pass by every day want to convert me. I’m not sure why it is that a Christian making this attempt creeps me out so much, but when Muslims try it just seems kind of sweet. I guess coming from any person who knows you, an attempt to convert is a kind of compliment, a way of saying: Come join us.

Maybe it’s because Christians tend to practice an indiscriminate, pamphleteering kind of outreach that makes it clear that they’re doing it to anyone unlucky enough to stumble across them, whereas Muslims in this country are much more low key. On the other hand, my Coptic Christian friends experienced a very different Islam in Egypt, which turned them very ardently against it. In fact, as far as I can tell, every religion seems to do better (by which I mean it doesn’t make so much trouble) when it in the minority: just part of the larger mix. I guess with the possible exception of Tibetan Buddhists, whom I’ve never heard anything particularly gory about.

It’s an interesting intellectual exercise to imagine the trouble Quakers would get up to if we ever constituted a politically powerful majority… the only government we ever had control of, in Pennsylvania, didn’t last long. Perhaps our small numbers are a blessing.

delight (monday)

2005-11-02T13:19:00.000-05:00

Spent the day in glorious anticipation of putting on my Halloween costume. I don’t really have a favorite holiday, but something about changing persona for a day is really appealing. In the elevator on the way home I was excitedly telling a Japanese coworker a story about assembling pieces of my costume (which included packets of squid ink).

When I told her that the black paper I purchased would be cut into a crown, I mispronounced the word: okan instead of ookan. Still Halloween appropriate, since okan means “coffin.” As she and I parted ways in the lobby I realized the source of the confusion and called after her to explain.

When I turned away, I noticed a well dressed Asian-American woman, looking rather confused, standing right behind me. I composed my face into a “can I help?” expression, but before I could say anything she spoke: “Do you speak English?” Gotta love a city where it’s a possibility that a white woman could speak only Japanese.

Oh, yes. Here is the costume, for the curious:

delight (saturday)

2005-11-01T18:18:00.000-05:00

On Friday I left work later than usual, and the door to the north of the building was already locked. I reluctantly went to the south door instead. It was a cold night, not the air but the speed of the wind. Looking down as I left the building, I saw what looked like a small brown leaf. When I walked toward it, it ran away from me. It was a bird little larger than the size of a silver dollar, fully fledged but for some reason unable to fly.

There are no trees near that door, and no visible nest it could have fallen from. It seemed confused and I was scared that someone would step on it, so I picked it up. It’s remarkably easy to catch a running bird. It perched on one finger and I closed my other hand around it, leaving an opening for its head. It peered out, shook itself slightly until its feathers puffed up, then tucked its head under its wing and slept.

Faced with this, a bird that sleeps in the hand, I couldn’t help myself. I walked carefully up the block and a half to the cigar store that I always hang out in during breaks, and asked one of the Yemenis who works there to give me a box. He and his coworker took a look at the bird and said “we used to eat those in Yemen.” But they agreed that this one was too small to eat and gave me a box, lined with crumpled paper towels. The bird went into the box without complaint and immediately went back to sleep.

A friend looked up a wildlife rehabilitation expert online and I called for advice. Going to sleep immediately is not a good sign, he said. “Birds under stress drown easily, so you shouldn’t give it any water. Don’t feed it, either. Just leave it in the box, because a cage would hurt its wings if it becomes agitated, and keep it someplace warm until tomorrow.” So I took the bird into the subway, where it ignored the squealing of the wheels and announcements and pinging, a little ball of brown and gray fluff with tiny fractal patterns on its neck where the feathers shifted over each other, head tucked firmly under wing.

When I got back to the house, after a little dinner, I took the bird to my room. I felt exhausted but strangely content, knowing that there was a wild animal sharing that warm, dark space with me. I slept very early.

In the early morning the lightening sky woke me. It was 6:30. The light reminded me that this is the hour that the birds begin singing. The cigar box on the floor by the radiator was silent. But when I opened it a pair of brilliant eyes, like marbles, like drops of black oil, were staring up at me. I closed the box quickly and carried it up to the roof.

Outside the air was much warmer than it had been on Friday. I lifted the lid again and the bird hopped out of the box onto my hand. It sat on my finger, looking at me, for a long moment; not more than five seconds, but enough for me to feel a sharp sting of regret that I could not keep it one more day, one more second.

And then it flew away into the blue dawn sky.

I think it was a winter wren.

the fall

2005-10-21T18:08:00.000-04:00

I went to the park again today. I meandered, swinging my arms to move the blood into them, climbing rocks, stretching my legs. On the way back to work I took a path around a pond, which was covered with duck weed. The grey light on that perfectly flat green expanse made me want to walk out onto the surface of the pond, sliding my feet like a child on a polished floor. Where the ducks swam into the duckweed they cut tracks of open water, which languidly half-closed behind them.

At the edge of the water, in a place where the path came close, there was a group of mallards. They were digging for something under the water, sleek heads going under and the bright pearls of water running off their green necks when they came up for air. I stood watching them for a long time. It might not count as prayer, but God was apparent to me in the elegance of those birds, unconcerned with the future and perfectly at rest where they were. I think the “fall” that all religions seem concerned with comes from there, the recognition that animals occupy a state of grace that is alien to us.

Maybe the truth is that animals are still living in the Garden of Eden. The Fall happened when we forgot that we live there too.

懐かしさ

2005-10-20T17:36:00.000-04:00

Today I took a walk in central park for my lunch break. I fear the time change, when suddenly it will be dark when I leave work. Then I’ll really have to accept that the winter is coming, and that there will be no more long evenings sitting on my roof looking out at the trees and buildings and open apartment windows, smoking shisha and watching the sky. It will all be cold air and protection, chapped lips and the wind howling through the narrow streets.

So I spent an hour in the early afternoon walking around in the sheep meadow, spinning in circles, watching the frisbees fly back and forth. The sun felt like honey, warm pouring over me wherever it touched, the shadows cool as glass. Why didn’t I spend every day doing this? Is the coming of fall inextricably tied to regret?

Now is the last sip of summer, when the sweetness has collected in the bottom of the glass and you’re heartbroken because there’s not enough left to savor, and you just have to tip your head back and try to catch every drop.

searching for it

2005-10-12T18:05:00.000-04:00

In my dream I was on a train somewhere in the west, passing by a mountain range that stood out against the sky, three dimensional, in brilliant colors. I looked at those mountains and knew that they were not real. “When the train goes behind those trees,” I said, “I will make the mountains into buildings before I get to the other side.”

But when the train passed the trees, instead of mountains there was a flat plain of water, as far as I could see, brilliant with reflected light. I gave a slight mental push, and towers began to rise out of the water, the same colors the mountains had been. When I finished bringing them up there was a city there, the skyline tracing the same shape in the sky that had been a mountain range before.

Then I became greedy. “If I can make cities,” I thought, “I can also fly above them.” And when I tried to fly, I did leave the ground, but something about the effort of it robbed me of the recollection that I was dreaming. I flew, but there was no exhilaration, no sense of freedom. It was a waste of the gift I was briefly given. And the dream changed around me to shades of brown and white, strict straight lines, an agitated figure running through a grid searching for something it would never find.

Sleeping or waking, I am grasping for too much.

homesickness

2005-09-23T18:35:00.000-04:00

i’ve avoided writing about morocco because to write about it would mean i was just remembering it instead of living in the memory. i feel as if the friend who invited me gave me a gift in a small box, and when i opened it a huge spill of golden light came pouring out, like the sun. it seemed very light for him when he handed it to me, but when i realized the weight of what was inside i was left speechless.

when people ask me where i went and what i did, i don’t have an answer that makes a good story. we stayed at home, went to the market, slept, ate. his mother made three meals every day, which we ate with our hands. there was one cup for water on the table, which we all shared. meals were sometimes silent, sometimes noisy, filled with talk in three languages. when they made fun of me too much i would talk back in japanese, or imitate his mother talking; “kat kat kat.”

we sat on the roof of his house, which looks out over the old maze city of fes, talking of light things or heavy ones, politics or family, cooking, love. when the time was right the sky would be filled with calls and cries, laid over each other like the reverberations in a concert hall, not so much beautiful as they were primal and a little frightening. they filled me with a wild joy, like i could spread out my borrowed robe and leap off the roof to join them in the air.

my friend’s sister told me her secrets and listened to mine. his brothers dusted off their old languages, forgotten since school, and teased me like real siblings. his mother went to the police station to get a notarized form saying that she was responsible for everything i did and anything that might happen to me, a requirement to staying with a family in a country with strict controls on ‘guides’. she gave me the paper and told me i was her daughter now. she walked behind me on the street, pulling my shirts down, holding my hand in the crowded squares.

in the old streets, grown up out of the earth a thousand years before i was born, my sense of direction was useless. i could remember each street, but not how one place turned into another. the streets were a deck of cards, reshuffled every night. ten days was not enough time to learn to count the cards. every street was like an image from the tarot, like a dream remembered since childhood, like a face – full of concealed layers and symbols, regarding me with its own thoughts. i was lost in that crowd of faces but safe with a family not my own.

only ten days, it’s not a long time. but when i came home, beside the usual strange perceptions that travel gives you, i was filled with such loneliness. i miss those street faces that make up the crowded city, i miss the mother and brothers and sister around the table.

the second day home i was sending instant messages to the youngest brother, trying to tell him how much the welcome his family gave me meant to me, trying to explain the strange closeness i felt with them. i said to him “you know i don’t have any brothers and sisters…” but he interrupted me. “no. you are my sister.”

and ignoring the office moving around me, the televisions chattering and the ringing phones, i put my head in my hands and cried.

jet lag

2005-09-16T12:49:00.000-04:00

So I got back from Morocco Tuesday, called in sick Wednesday, came in to work yesterday. Forgot until after it was already over that I'd made an appointment for acupuncture. So I called the acupuncturist, told him that I am an idiot, and asked if I could come anyway.

The answer was yes, so I stopped to get cash at an ATM that would only talk to me in Spanish no matter what buttons I pressed. I transferred $100 from checking to savings before finally succeeding in getting some money out of the thing.

Then I walked along 56th Street, looking for the address I'd just written down. The acupuncturist is Japanese, and midway between 5th and 6th avenues I found a sign for the Osaka spa. The address and suite were what I thought I remembered.

I told the girl at the desk that I was here for an acupuncture appointment with Dr. Murata. She seemed busy but said "yes, yes" and took me to a little room. "Take off all your clothes," she said, "and wear this towel." When I poked my head out, she guided me to a steam room.

I spent twenty minutes sitting in the eucalyptus clouds, watching as the henna patterns dyed on my hands seemed to dance through the steam. Warm water dripped from the ceiling.

When I came out of the room, the busy girl took me to a Japanese style bath. It struck me as odd that she should be Korean. I showered and moved between the hot and cold baths, completely happy to be back in this environment, one of my favorite parts of living in Japan.

The girl didn't seem to want to come back, so I poked my head out again. At this rate I'd only get 30 minutes of acupuncture, which wasn't what I thought I was signing up for. She told me to please sit down and drink my tea, which was waiting for me outside the bath.

Then the manager came. She was also Korean. The henna on my hands horrified her, she was convinced that it would absorb through the skin and mess up my immune system. She wanted me to fill out a form, and asked who had recommended me. I said that my old boss had told me that Mr. Murata was an excellent acupuncturist.

A little cloud passed across her face. "Dr. Murata?" she aked.

Long and short of it is: I had to pay a visit to Dr. Murata's office to apologise for missing two appointments in one day. The eucalyptus steam bath was half price, because it was only half my mistake.

Dr. Murata is a sweet man with an office a few doors down from the Osaka spa. He forgave me from behind a screen, came out to look for something, and saw my hands. His eyes filled with delight. He lived in Morocco for 6 years, doing acupuncture for the last king. And he cupped my hands in his own, turning them as delicately as if they were baby birds.

行ってきます

2005-09-02T17:58:00.000-04:00

i’m off to morocco for ten days, but just had to post before i left.

i found a site detailing the religious significance of hurricane katrina.

this person is crazy, but crazy in a really detailed, organized, connected way. i wish i had the sheer drive and ability to retain information necessary to construct fantasies like his.

i could live without his utter lack of sympathy for anyone, and his desire to blame almost everything on female promiscuity, but the ability to concentrate… wow.

i’ll put up pictures of morocco when I get back.

keep me in the light, please.

reputation

2005-08-31T15:43:00.000-04:00

i think mine just took a turn for the worse.

i was sitting alone in the bathroom, with nothing much to occupy the mind, and operating on a rather severe sleep shortage. i think someone in the office complained about the lack of paper toilet seat covers in the bathroom, because some have appeared, but since there aren’t any dispensers yet they’re just sitting on the purse shelves. they’re stapled to a little cardboard instruction sheet written in three languages.

recently i’ve been having more interactions in french so i began to read the french instructions aloud. dramatically, à la scarlett o’hara.

really, it’s serious sleep deficit.

finishing up my reading i heard the outer of the two doors leading to the bathroom, so i fell silent. the woman who came in after me and i came out of our stalls simultaneously, and washed our hands after a brief exchange of smiles in the mirror. and then, as i was glancing away from her, i saw them.

in the farthest stall.

two motionless and silent strappy gold sandals. attached to the feet of some horrified office member, trying to remain still enough that i would just go away without noticing her.

it was that kind of silence, a girl can tell.

thank god i have another pair of shoes under my desk, i’m just hoping that changing them immediately will prevent my identification.

web

2005-08-29T17:39:00.000-04:00

i am practicing gratitude recently, like a mantra, like a meditation. this is something my muslim friends have taught me. crossing the street on a hot day the breeze comes down the canyon of skyscraper walls and lifts the hair from my sweaty neck; thank you. an old friend sends an email full of love and the weight of shared experience; al hamdullilah. through the flutter and hiss of an internet phone line a new friendship forms, crystalline, like the delicate multicolored towers that slowly expanded to fill an old fishbowl when i mixed the packets from my childhood chemistry set. thank you, thank you.

sometimes it is harder. i try to see the goodness in the pain in my arms that never seems to go away anymore, to be filled with joy all the time. my concentration slips a lot. i curse things that should be blessings. but the constant pressure to say my thanks out loud feels less like a constriction and more like support.

i long to be bound up in filaments of gratitude, strong and flexible, allowing pain to flow out like water through a sieve, holding happiness in.

re-cast

2005-08-08T18:06:00.000-04:00

i had this egyptian boyfriend, and for a long time he made me very unhappy. since we broke up i hadn’t talked to him in a million years, by which i mean six months, which is perhaps why he stopped making me sad. but recently i saw him and everything was sort of ok in an uncomfortable, where is this going kind of way, and so the other day i was thinking of going to see him. i stood outside the entrance to the subway where i used to call him after work when we were dating, when he wouldn’t answer even though we had planned to talk until i called him ten times, and then when he answered he’d yell at me and then hang up on me so we wouldn’t end up talking anyway, and i’d cry and cry and not care who was looking. and then i’d call him back in the vain hope that this time it would be possible to talk, and this time he’d answer the first time, but he would still yell at me and i’d yell at him and then i’d take my distraught self down the steps and into the subway, where people would studiously avoid looking at me.

so, i was trying to call him. and he didn’t answer, but i knew he wasn’t mad at me, so i hung up and called back in case he didn’t hear the phone the first time. when the voice mail picked up the second time i knew it was because he couldn’t answer the phone, but that even if it was because he wouldn’t answer the phone that i didn’t care. it struck me as so amazing that the location and the players could be the same, but the emotion so different.

and then this girl came walking past me, yelling in what i think was korean into her phone, then collapsed against the wall at exactly the place where i used to repetitively smack my hand when i was talking to the egyptian. her face was covered with tears. as i was leaving a message for my ex, i saw her take the phone away from her ear, look at it in disbelief, close it, and wait a few seconds before she dialed it again. whoever it was answered and she began yelling and crying again.

so clearly it was the same play – i just had a slightly modified part this time. as i watched this scene unfold something just barely heavy enough to notice landed on my foot and stuck there in a way that caught my attention. sitting on my toes was an incredibly furry caterpillar, yellowish, with a shiny red ant-head and four longer red fur tufts at each end of its plump body. it looked up without seeing me so i picked it up and set it on some plants at the base of one of those trees in a box. it climbed as high as it could go and then cast its body upward as if dissatisfied. so i picked it up again, set it on the tree trunk, and watched as it inched unerringly up through the branches; its whole existence focused on going up.

when i turned around, my successor as crying girlfriend had disappeared. i was sad… i wanted to tell her that her next part may be stranger and more hopeful: that in the next scene her role may only be to watch something, miraculous and determined, heading for the light.

happiness

2005-07-29T18:18:00.000-04:00

click for more pictures!

just bought tickets for morocco. i’ll be going at the beginning of september, too late to see my friend abdu’s wedding but i can still stay with another friend and see the new couple. they are both from fes, in the north. i’ll stay at said’s house, with his mother and family. the ticket was expensive but i realized that it is an opportunity i would be crazy to turn down.

looking for pictures to of fes it finally started to feel real to me, that i would be in that place. morocco has been a magic world to me for the last ten years, and now because of my friends’ generosity i have the chance to walk through the mirror.

the timing is good because it means i can feel again how i did as a child, the approaching fall bringing mystery and adventure.

i can’t wait to see what’s on the other side of that golden door.

i've been lazy

2005-07-28T16:53:00.000-04:00

so, in the last two weeks the important things that have happened are:

went to boston on business, which was a blast. an interview only takes an hour and we were there for seven, so we spent the extra time walking around cambridge and over the bridge to boston, ate italian food in a cute little restaurant. the table tops in the restaurant were paintings on multiple layers of glass. it gave the scenes an illusion of depth. i describe this because it was interesting, not because it was cool. net effect was kitsch. the waitress had a bostonian/italian-american accent and was very blonde. then interview, then shopping, and finally local beers on a terrace looking out over the water. work should be like this more often.

also, will hopefully be getting a press pass soon. this is a sign that my boss was serious about giving me more responsibility. responsibility means work, but it looks like it’s going to be interesting work.

the small thing that’s made me most happy this week was walking home from work yesterday. i brought one of those paper chinese umbrellas as a sun umbrella in the morning, but when i was walking home it started raining lightly. the sound of the rain on the waxed paper, crisp popping, was a sheer delight.

stranger in a strange land

2005-07-13T17:52:00.000-04:00

had my physical therapy appointment today. this damn arm just kills me. so anyway, there i was being electrically stimulated, which i complain about but secretly enjoy, watching my hand jump and twitch without my control.

there was an older woman across the room from me, one of those ones who probably doesn’t have enough people to talk to in her normal life. she needed to fill the empty space with sound. this reminds me of the song by uncle bonsai, describing a certain type of man:

just like the marching bands they heard as boys, they need to make some noise

to prove they’re there

anyway, this lady wanted to know if i knew anything about crystals. well now, i’m from boulder colorado. and i did spend a couple years hanging around a hippie new age store as a child. so i told this lady that she shouldn’t wear her new quartz crystal bracelet, and that she should wash it in distilled water and leave it in the sun for a day to cleanse it of strangers’ energy. this is very good advice, exactly what the people at the hippie store would say. except, of course, i don’t believe a word.

got me to thinking about all the people i have been in my life. of course there is a consistent thread, the profound draw to the alien, in both the science fiction and immigration and naturalization services senses. but there are people i have been in the past still with me in my head, and some of them i barely recognize. what was i doing in that new age shop? for that matter, what am i doing hanging out in an egyptian coffee shop now?

will this i, too, become an unrecognizable stranger?

patriotism

2005-07-05T18:19:00.000-04:00

Went to see the fireworks from Queens on Independence Day. It was fun to be in the crowd that gathered in the street, all the different languages, packs of children sitting on the roofs of cars to get a better look. I was there with a friend of mine, a Moroccan, who will be taking his oath as a US citizen in a few more months. After all that’s happened, it’s a relief that he still wants to. He told me that democracy rests on having many choices, so he plans to join the Green party. More power to him, I say.

Every year I make it a point to sing America the Beautiful, first AND second verses. Most people don’t seem to know the second one, so here it is:

O beautiful for patriot dream
That sees beyond the years
Thine alabaster cities gleam
Undimmed by human tears!
America! America!
God mend thine every flaw,
Confirm thy soul in self-control,
Thy liberty in law!

I like the acknowledgment that as a nation we have flaws. And that it is patriotic to go about fixing them. That’s an attitude sadly missing from the consciousnesses of some people whose names we won’t mention.

Wonder what it would take to change the national anthem?

more seedpods

2005-07-01T18:03:00.000-04:00

two days ago i spent a half an hour on the phone with a member of the ku klux klan. i had called to set up an interview with him, and when he called me back, he seemed to want to chat.

i had spent some time earlier in the day looking at lynching photos, so i was surprised by how pleasant this guy was. especially since, after some conversation, it came out that he thought i was chinese. oh, that sneaky last name of mine!

he asked me to reassure the japanese reporter who is going to interview him. “i know she might be a little nervous coming down here to meet with a white supremacist. but we’ve got something called southern hospitality.”

then i went online this morning and had a good conversation with an internet café owner in baghdad that i chat with sometimes. there weren’t any power outages today, so it was a nice long talk. apparently there’s no running water anywhere in baghdad right now, because somebody blew up a treatment center. but he said that, after things are safer there, i should come visit.

they’ve got something called iraqi hospitality.

seed pods

2005-06-28T16:09:00.000-04:00

sitting on the train today, reading my book. it’s a book of arabic grammar, so i was looking at it and kind of talking to myself, reading things aloud. i figure, i might as well be the weird one on the train if no-one else is gonna step up to the plate.

but this guy stood next to me in the door, looked down, and said “it’s not that bad, you know. once you learn the forms of the verbs it’s easy.” and when i looked up at him, puzzled, he said “i was a muslim for 15 years, but then i got mad at god. the religion is fine. it was god i couldn’t take.”

and then he got off the train.

i was sad i had to go to work, because that was a conversation i wanted to continue.

sometimes i forget that all these people i curse for stopping at the head of the stairs when I am trying to make it down them in time to catch the train that is tantalizingly just sitting there, or whose drippy umbrellas rub up against my legs and send a trickle of rain into my shoes, or who just put their heads against the subway pole and sleep, all these people; they are three dimensional and miraculous. they’re the seed pods i played with as a child, smooth on the outside, but if you peel them open a profusion of hairs and tiny seed grains, infinite complexity, spills out into your hand.

quakers say there is that of god in every person. i think real religion is the capacity to see it, to respond to it. to call it out.

purpose

2005-06-23T17:36:00.000-04:00

i find that looking at jellyfish goes a long way toward convincing me that no matter how horrible things are, everything is still fundamentally all right. their hypnotic movements make your mind move slowly, and the astounding alien beauty of them keeps you from looking away. it is a never-ending comfort to me that i was created by the same things that shaped the world and all these stunning creatures.

a while ago i was listening to alan watts, a philosopher, and something he said struck me as especially wonderful. even if you don’t believe in god, or a sentient creator, the fact remains that the forces that keep the galaxies and planets in motion are active on a much smaller scale right here. the same patterns that fuel the stars are responsible for your presence here. you are made of the same stuff. so forget god. what's important is that in you, the universe has produced a part of itself that is capable of looking back at the whole, and appreciating it in its entirety.

i think that if we have a moral obligation to do anything, that’s it. to take responsibility for our own eyes and our own intellect. to be appreciative. to be awake. what else is consciousness good for?

unbelievable

2005-06-22T18:22:00.000-04:00

Sometimes things are too strange and wonderful to believe.

a twelve year old girl was kidnapped by seven men who wanted to force her to marry one of them. in ethiopia, apparently kidnapping, beating, and even rape are used to coerce women into marriage. but when the group of men began beating her, three lions emerged from the forest and drove them away, guarding the girl until her relatives and the police came for her. the situation they put this girl in is horrifying, but with the ending it sounds like an old fairy tale, before the darkness was taken out of them.

i love the image of rare ethiopian lions swooping down on a group of men, with their black manes and fiery eyes. the policeman who found her said, "they stood guard until we found her and then they just left her like a gift and went back into the forest."

let’s hope that people in this area are superstitious enough to think that she is under the lions’ protection. no one would dare touch her again.

this makes me even more excited for the show i am going to see tonight.

my leisure pastime

2005-06-21T16:08:00.000-04:00

other than watching stupid japanese television, that is.

i had to stop going to my regular place in queens, so i bought my own shisha and now i smoke it on my roof. kicking back and looking out over the park as the curls of scented smoke drift around me, it is a real escape. now, when i say looking over the park i should clarify that it’s not THAT park, and also that it isn’t really next door. i ain’t that rich! but you can see green things from my roof. it looks like this:

on the other side you can see the empire state and the chrysler buildings, but only their tips.

when i’m feeling especially flush, i put white wine in the base. the flavor of the smoke is especially good with cherry and rose, and white wine and ice in the bottom. the wine adds depth and the cherry adds sweetness.

it makes me happy to have habits that are traceable to a traveling experience or a person i don’t see often. with the shisha, i can call up ghosts along with the smoke.

i work in an icebox

2005-06-14T17:49:00.000-04:00

the receptionist's desk at my office

ok, not really.

but the place is extremely cold, year-round. all winter it was okay. i had a sweater and a blanket to put over my lap. but clearly, summer in this office means that it’s time to break out a hat and gloves. there’s something so irritatingly uneconomical, not to mention piss poor for the environment, about needing to use a space heater in june to counteract the air conditioning. looks like i’ll have to move back to japan.

the kingdom of heaven is at hand

2005-06-13T17:51:00.000-04:00

when i first saw a trailer for it, i remember thinking that it looked like an ill-timed joke. then i read this article by robert fisk. this marks the first time i’ve been moved to tears by a description of people watching a movie. it’s rare to come across something so hopeful written about the middle east, unless it’s written by some terminally irritating bush apologist like david brooks or thomas friedman. but fisk is no apologist for anyone, including the status quo in the countries that he has spent his adult life living in and reporting on. 29 years in lebanon would make a pessimist out of anybody. plus, he’s british.

in my conversations with my muslim friends, they constantly emphasize the historical tolerance for other faiths in the islamic empire. while i’ve found many evangelical sites debunking the stories my friends tell, isn’t it significant that these muslims, in this time, want to see mercy and tolerance for others in their history? for all the hyperventilating in certain circles, i’d sooner give my back to a moderate muslim than a fundamentalist christian.

go broncos!

2005-06-10T17:59:00.000-04:00

can’t believe that i made fun of football players for all those years. reggie rivers is articulate and absolutely, spot-on-the-nose, dead right. i’m so proud that he played for my state! for that annoying and noisy blue-and-orange themed bunch of thick-necked hunks of beef that always used to interrupt shows i really wanted to watch, like, say, the “ spock gets married ” episode for the 10th time.

how wrong i was! and no, i don’t mean about star trek. it was and remains a brilliant show.

easy astral travel through boredom

2005-06-08T11:20:00.000-04:00

although my job involves many things, the one that takes up the most time is transcribing interviews from audio tape. these tapes are full of information on dealings in the financial world, real estate companies, the intricacies of offshore insurance agencies and the tax regimes that support them. it is, for a photography and creative writing major, profoundly boring. the nice thing is that though i have to listen carefully and type exactly what i hear, i don’t have to listen with active attention. this leaves the consciousness free to go traveling.

i highly recommend repetitive tasks like transcription to recover memories… for me it only goes back to things that happened in my late teens, but i am constantly reliving brief stretches of long forgotten experiences. for the first couple of months, i wrote them all down, but that became exhausting, so now i just make little notes when a memory is especially strong.

maybe i should post a list.

i cause nothing but trouble

2005-06-05T23:37:00.000-04:00

well, the other day i went on a walk with a moroccan hot dog seller who works near my office, to the garage for his cart, talking in french about religion, mostly.

and then two days later his wife told me, and him, off. i'm no longer supposed to speak to him.

so she was angry, and i was apologizing to her in my flustered french, and he was apologizing to me. what a mess.

the funny part is, i was very happy that he was married, because then there could be no misunderstanding between him and me about what was possible from the relationship.

as my boyfriend rachid said once of a problem, it's like harira. a big jumble, with everything thrown in.

on the bright side i took this picture that afternoon.

conundrum

2005-06-01T18:58:00.000-04:00

i know it's a cliché but it's pretty. sue me.

so here's the difficulty. i lived in Japan for 4 years, and in that time i made many friends. i sought out the people who didn't seek me out. it's exhausting to be hunted as the "trophy foreigner," the prop to be showed off to real friends. so if people i didn't know approached me, i was immediately suspicious that this was someone in the market for free english lessons and perhaps an introduction to an American boyfriend.

oh, how old prejudice comes to bite you in the ass.

because i find myself thinking, isn't it ridiculous to live in new york city and have not even one black friend? how can I know new york if i have no meaningful interaction with a group that makes up a third of this city's population?

but if i go out of my way looking for a friend based on the qualification of race, what does that make me?

crap. moving to japan cured me of exoticizing asians, because i am too used to them. spending a couple of years looking at almost nothing but asian faces, and i finally extinguished the little light that used to go off in my brain, that blinked "other" or "foreigner" at me and prevented me from seeing asian people for who they are instead of where they're from.

so perhaps immersion is, again, the answer? should i move to harlem? or is this the annoying liberal's dilemma, so obsessed with eradicating internal racism that the very desire becomes another form of putting distance between myself and everybody else?

one of my friends in japan, when i pointed out the various nationalities of the group that we were sitting with, (something along the lines of "isn't it cool that we have all the continents represented?") replied that he hadn't noticed.

"why are americans so fucked up about race and nationality?" he asked.

good question.

first night in paris

2005-05-26T17:26:00.001-04:00

this couple was walking toward notre dame, across the street from the seine. i love how blurry everything is, the movement in their legs, the strange rich colors. the first day in a foreign country is like being drunk, awash in sensation, wide awake and overpowered.

ghost ranch

2005-05-23T14:05:00.000-04:00

an eternal fascination for me.

if I had to place the center of my world on a map, it might be there, despite the fact that all the time I've spent there wouldn't add up to more than a few months.

Georgia O'Keeffe lived there at the foot of the cliffs, looking out over the plains toward Mount Pedernal, painting it over and over. she said it was her private mountian... God had promised her that "if I painted it often enough I could have it."

the desire is fierce to absorb something about that place into the skin, and when I think back on it now I feel it well up into me, a trapped helpless longing to fly away to the red sand and the quiet and the swirling stars. I want the dry rustling under grey-green brush that might mean a rattlesnake or just an errant breeze. I want the ants, everywhere, busy with their tiny concerns, mapping out roads and defending territory, oblivious to me towering over them. The rocks probably feel the same way about us with our nervous humming and skittering about.

usually it's enough to know that it's there, unchanging, the slow erosion of rain and wind invisible to me. but when the hunger strikes I feel like some part of me is denied oxygen away from Ghost Ranch, like my thin root tendrils are stretching farther and farther away from the home soil, exposed to the merciless sun.

away from the desert, I am parched.

brilliant

2005-03-30T14:55:00.000-05:00

I know I said I would post my pictures of France when I got back, but this image is so arresting that I feel compelled to put it up first. Erwin Wurm, the sculptor, has put his finger on the American problem.

la basilique de lisieux

2005-03-17T17:59:00.000-05:00

less than a week and i'll be here. a spate of heartbreak and condensed energy impelled me to buy a ticket a month ago, and as i am now going stir crazy, it's a good thing i did. i'll post my own photos when i get back.

reflections

2005-03-10T15:02:00.000-05:00

This isn't mine. Isn't it beautiful?

this is what I'm talking about

2005-02-28T00:32:00.000-05:00

I hate knowing that my flag now stands for a country capable of torture and unconcerned with the opinions of the world, arrogant and ignorant of history, contemptuous of others. I understand now the feelings of idealistic Zionists, seeing something beautiful and cherished turn malign.

It's difficult to know whether to fight to for your vision of something, or against the thing it is becoming. To make a terribly trivial analogy, what was the point in Star Wars where it became more appropriate to fight against the emerging Empire than to try to rescue the democratic Republic it came from? How do you tell if a structure is still sound, or if it needs to be torn down and built again?

The End of the Moon

2005-02-27T14:32:00.000-05:00

I saw Laurie Anderson's new piece at the Brooklyn Academy of Music last night. The stage was dark and simple, only a chair off to the side, a control stand downstage, a stand upstage center for her souped-up viola. The floor was lit with randomly placed candles, white, in low glass jars.

It's funny following someone's work. Even though I hadn't seen this piece before, I know what she's working on - I recognize the turns of phrase and can even predict them. I can see why fans start to think that they have relationships with the objects of their adoration. "How can I know him so well without him knowing me?"

The show made me cry, mostly the clear eyed gaze on the militarization of the world and this country. Her description of her fear that one day there will be a military base on the moon, barely visible even by telescope "but you'll still know it's there," gave me chills.

What should you do when you're aware that something precious is being lost, but you don't know how to fight for it?

let the beauty we love be what we do

2005-02-25T11:36:00.000-05:00

I know I have read this before, but sometimes you have to see something more than once to really understand it.

Today, like every other day, we wake up empty
and frightened. Don't open the door to the study
and begin reading. Take down a musical instrument.
Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.

- Rumi