Back to Blood

Blood is thicker than water.

And I want to ask "Why the contest?"  Because the truth is--blood cannot exist without water and the breathing of the blooded ones offers breath to the water cycle.  There is no contest.  Nolo contendere.

That's a legal term for not contesting a charge but allowing it to go forward.  Nolo contendere.  I am not going to fight you, argue or protest.  But I am not going to confess, either.  Water and blood.  What's so great about thick, anyway?  It stays put better?  Flows slower?  Is this a good thing? 

The point, as most of us know, is that blood relations--familial DNA and its entangled helixes of heart, hubris and humanity--holds sway, trumps other forms of relationship.  But I wonder.  Nolo contendere.  Blood--you've got the power in the courtroom, but I'm not so sure how your argument holds up in the messy, fecund world outside the stony walls of argument. A test is only one demonstration.  Mundane life is a test of its own and may reveal truths at odds with those provided in a the pitched state of "proving." Like the slow migrations of characteristics across generations, blood's sanguinity is intrinsically affected  by water's mobility. Water's lowered viscosity carries mutations and adaptations across a planet that seems nearly as vast as the interior worlds of its beings migrating along and across its waters.

Migration has a price.  The disconnect from embedded life in a place and a people can cause a palpable rift in a life course, like a river diverted.  This can be freeing--as it was perhaps for my forbearers leaving oppressions and moving toward promises (however vague and differently realized). My father didn't seem to yearn for the farm left behind here in Nebraska.  I think the life was spare, mean and grueling enough that even the romance of the land and sky could not balance those muscle and mind-wearing realities.  My grandma did not painstakingly save the chicken money to have the boys return to muck the silage. The family vision was one of mental, not menial labor.  This may be a vision of progress that bears some course correction, but it does appear to be a common catalyst for migrations.

Yet, there is a loss, a grief;  my father always planted a garden...always.  There has never been quite the miracle equal to that of the spring green pea upon my two year old tongue, the bright laugh of the snapdragon's mouth opening and closing between my father's fingers behind the parsonage in Scranton.

My mother never ceased to sigh longingly about the ocean--the wet salt smell and blue-sifted light of Maine. 

And they kept changing locations--packing us up and moving from city to city in the territory between their hometowns--Boston and Hebron--the thumbtacks of origin holding the map of upward mobility.

I never quite recovered from moving from Minnesota during one of those shifts.  Even now, in times of stress or joy, the exaggerated clip of the northern vowels, the Nordic sing-song of sentence structure, slips through causing the labor nurse in Indy to ask me where I'm "from." 

That has always been a question that flummoxes me. People generally want a one-word answer to that question.   The historian/ sociologist/scholar in me wishes to retrace the geographic steps--which I believe are also psychical steps.  Geographies shape societies and psyches both.  Mountain people indeed are that.  And peoples dwelling on rivers cannot help but have a sense of flow, of there-to-here-to-there, as well as a gestalt of stream bed/containment with the rising beyond the bank as a horizon of change.  Our place shapes us as much or more as we shape our place-- the plat lines are more a dream than the insistently shifting sinuous shape of real geographies.

How to trace the "from" of self? These are lines on an invisible map. Like the magnetic fields so clear to migratory birds and bugs,  I am "from" Minnesota, but also the church my parents pledged their lives to.  I am from the odd Germanic migration of ancestors but also from the hidden spots on the genealogical branch--usually the women who's "maiden" names unravel in the patriarchal parceling land and progeny. 

I am also "from" the acts of Minnesota, hidden in plain sight--from the marginalizing of Jane Schoolcraft who helped to find the Mississippi headwaters, only to have her husband make up an "Indian" name from Latin words.  I am from the small brown women birthing children in my lineage, their skin tone not mentioned, their mothers' names conveniently forgotten.  I am from the bussing of dark-skinned children into white-skinned people's neighborhoods in Indianapolis. I am from the oppressive turning of teacher's and administrator's backs to the confusion and conflict that convulse in the wake of throwing disparate worlds together in linoleum hallways. I am from the healing tutorials of the descendants of slaves who coached me as I tried to understand.  I am from the silver reach of the Sycamore across ravines in the karst territory of Indiana--a state named for a people who don't even have a reserve in that place.  

And  I am "from" an even more messy mélange--an interior geography--an breath-holding course of study in the academy, a lifetime of poetry, mothering in difficult (and are they not always difficult?) times.  I am from that life lived, now and moving, always moving through time and territory.  And moved to Nebraska, I am from Indiana. In Indiana, I am from Bloomington and in Bloomington, from Sanders.  In Sanders, I am from somewhere else, having arrived just this generation, while my neighbors remember the children who walked the dirt roads and ate Ramps from the shadows of quarries.  But I am from my parents and from my present, as well.  I am from the bed where I dream, each night.  I am from those dreams and from the repetitions of my daily life that seems both more and less real than those dreams.  I am from this page that is a kind of dream, itself.  I am from you, to whom I am speaking.  Am I speaking to you?  There is a trace, here, from me to you and back again, it traces a line across thought and consciousness--like the dream, the joke, the intuitive leap.

There are many laments about our electronic connections--cartoons showing everyone looking at a little handheld communicator with no exchange in the geography around them.  Lamentable, perhaps.  Certainly ironic.  But the irony may rest in how that represents a reality that is present, cell phone/tablet or not.  The zap of a genuine connection does seem to ride waves more comprised of wave than particle:  We often lumber numbly around each other while our thoughts, emotions and communications weave and hum invisibly like honeybees deep in an April rose bush. Indeed, the web of connectivity that hopscotches across miles, borders, oceans and skies, seems somehow to capture an old yearning that our physical migrations enacted in clannish slo-mo.  It may not be all to the good that we can celebrate or mourn an uprising, a death, a miraculous save halfway across the globe, one mind to another, disembodied but also unencumbered by the heavy weight of the caravan of culture and the trappings of identity. But it may not be all to the bad, either.  What happens when we connect this way?
 Like the curtain of northern lights, can these connections flash across an old sky in new ways, revealing patterns in the vastness, traces that we might not have otherwise known?

‘Quién puede borrar las huellas?’ Who Can Remove the Traces by Regina José Galindo. These meditations began with this question posed by Ms. Galindo as she placed bloody footprints across a place.  She walked the question across the town square, in front of the courthouse and leading to the jail to the road to the graveyard to the people.  She dips her bare feet in a basin of blood and she reveals the traces--of the couple who killed themselves down the street in Sanders and down dirt roads of rural history, of their children and their new life-stories woven with threads of grief.  Her steps reveal the traces of my garden and its implication in the constrictions of cultivation. Galindo reveals the traces of history and of the lonely resolute traveler--someone who finds those traces just by paying attention to them, walking to them, walking from them.  She reveals the traces of our longing--to migrate, to stay, to change, to belong, to be visible to love  and yet to disappear when the searchlight beams our way. Nolo Contendere. Blood and water. She doesn't ask what can remove the traces but who.   She pauses, places the basin on the concrete, dips a naked foot into the blood and steps. And as we witness, it become our footprint, too.

photos by Mark Beebe, Painting by Mark Beebe.

Transmigration of the Soul

We have never

been here before, but we have arrived,  

to be mended in, whatever way we fit,

histories like songs on a page, bones

like books on a shelf.  Hearts beat inside us,

on highways, passing, slowing down, blinking

and bumping through places all of a piece--

absurdly distant, impossibly close.

 

 


"What's another term for a semi-truck full of codfish barreling across the country?  [pause pause pause] Transmigration of the sole."  I once loved a hippie who was also a truck driver. He loved this joke. He loved John Harford's music, too.  And me, he loved me. My soles have transmigrated to Nebraska, for now, and my soul is finding its way.

I think I shocked a Nebraskan colleague the other day when I confessed that my mate and I had researched emigrating to Canada in a serious way prior to this move in exactly the opposite direction we intended.  We were aiming for Nova Scotia and wound up in whaaa?  Nebraska?

I explained that the very ancestors who settled here in Nebraska [thus rendering this move a cosmic return of epically ironic proportion] had emigrated with fierce determination from Germany when the Kaiser was drafting folks into his army.  They were having none of that and came to America.  The flat middle of America.  And they worked hard.  My dad and his siblings got sent to the state university on my Grandma's chicken money. Tyson chicken factories don't raise enough chickens to send my sons to even a few classes at community college these days and I fully expect to die owing student loans.

Times change and so do peoples.  This is a nation of invaders--the fleeing people from old lands where they no longer fit in.  Even the "first peoples" inhabiting these plains were new to the land at some point.  There were migrations and invasions and settlements and resettlements amongst those peoples as well. My mate has been watching a PBS special about the West and in one part a bunch of land was offerred to the American Indians/First Peoples in exchange for them all moving there and living in carefully platted sections to keep the peace between them  The Crow refused to move there because they feared the Sioux; the Sioux when questioned if they would invade Crow territory replied, "Well, yes, conquest is our way; is it not yours?" Nevertheless, those beleaguered peoples made this mega-reservation work until a Caucasian settler's cow wandered in and a mind-numbingly stupid episode of oppression run amok mowed down an entire village, babies and all.

Dwelling is a temporary condition.  Home-making is something of a paradox--pointing to the extreme temporal qualities of our existence. Build it and they will come and dwell temporarily and then it falls down and they move along. 

We watched a movie about a Tibetan Buddhist teacher with a scene where he is chatting with a grandchild. He teases her a bit saying "when you have goats, you have goat problems, when you have a house, you have house problems, when you have money, you have money problems...So what do you want to have?" The little girl replies "I don't want to have anything."  He laughs shortly and says "But then what will you eat when you are hungry?" The little girl pauses only a beat and says "I just want to be normal then" and the teacher-grandfather chuckles and says "yes" with a wry smile.   It was a middle path teaching.  If we have food, we will have food problems but with no food, we have hunger problems.  Tigers above, tigers below, dangling from a cliff with a berry growing from a crevasse nearby--that is another teaching about our basic situation in life.

So in an elaboration on that berry, I have relocated my home-making to a plains state.  The state my father left to find his better path for his pacifist self and the state one set of great grandparents landed in as a better place than the old world building a dubious empire.  It is the dubious empire of the U.S. that my husband and I are fatigued with.  We have been conscripted into an army of over-consumers, burning through the last of the fossil fuels, melting glaciers in lands far away and bemoaning the rage of both weather and human trauma that trails in the wake of such mindless aggressions.

How did my ancestors know it was time to go?  When the soldiers knocked on their doors? When their daughters were wooed (or worse) by men in boots?  When their sympathies were questioned because of the faith they practiced? Or the slant of their eyes?  Were their papers examined and found wanting?  Their lands or their labor taxed to put buttons on uniforms that represented actions they did not believe in? Were they deprived of essential liberties in the name of national security?

Um. 

That said, I'm still here.  I even moved further to the middle of the empire--they call it the "heartland" around here.  Nebraskans secretly love that term.  A Tibetan teacher recently gave a talk here (a mild cultural jolt) and he kept calling Nebraska the "heartbeat."   I suspect his Malaprop to be small tease of a lesson, changing the treasured nickname to be just a little off. What does it mean to shift from Heartland to heartbeat?  Land to beat.   The verb "beat" without the heart hurts.  To beat is to hit, unless this is a heart; with the heart it is the contraction and expansion that keeps us alive.  So Rimpoche moved ol' Big Red from being a thing to being an act. From matter to mind?  He taught on that.  Does the contraction and expansion of Empire move concentrically out from here, the geographic center of the states?  What if it did?

The beginnings of vast movements--of rivers, glaciers, peoples--can be quite small, rather innocuous....maybe even hard enough to find that one needs special help, native eyes, for example

When I grew up in Minnesota, we all knew that the headwaters of the mighty Mississippi begin in a rather unassuming lake amongst the 10,000--Lake Itasca.  The beginnings of something can be so very small, so embedded and so intertwined with tributaries and trickles as to be nearly unidentifiable.  But Henry Schoolcraft of the late 1800's determined to find the headwaters. Lake Itasca (Elk Lake in Ojibwa) was Henry's best bet.  He renamed it with shards of Latin (Ita from Truth) and sca (from Head) to sound Indian but not be Indian.  There is additional pathos here in that his wife's heritage was solidly half Ojibwa and undoubtedly essential to his success.  She, of late, has become of interest to scholars of the "margins": She wrote poetry and lived between and in both the Native and Caucasian worlds--writing and speaking languages from each throughout her life. She died in Canada visiting a sister, poetry unpublished.  Henry is buried with his second wife in a D.C. cemetery having estranged himself from his children by marrying a southern woman who wrote pro-slavery literature and spoke loudly against the intermarrying of the races. To add insult to injury--her writings actually got published (with Henry's help) with even a bestseller in the mix. That is an American frontier story for us in the "heartbeat" to consider. Ah Jane Johnston Schoolcraft may you rest in peace now that we have found the heart to remember you. 

One analysis of the most recent Presidential election notes the significant mobilization of American Indian peoples. It is no small irony this saw an African American to a second term as President of this particular U.S. empire.

In going back to where my father began, I am able to cultivate a new compassion for him and for his ancestors. I am a bit stunned--freshly landed at one of the wellsprings of my heritage, the landing spot for a strange Germanic crowd so pacifist that my 93 year Aunt's community efforts are still to support the Nebraska Peace Coalition.

The Tibetan teacher--someone part of a diaspora from that invaded land--spoke about mind and matter and how what matters in the end is the mind--that the work of ending abusive empires begins in our own little empire of the mind. I spent last summer treasuring the sweet specifics of Southern Indiana, suspecting but resisting an impending migration.  Strangers in a strange land, forced to sing a new song by the rivers of Babylon....we all are essentially souls on the hoof.  Migration is something that we do--in bodies, in minds...across time and space. Jane Johnston Schoolcraft died unpublished but like the small blue waters of Lake Itasca, her poetry has been voiced, I think--in river of peoples claiming a vote. 

Transmigration of the soul really need no trucks, nor ships, Prairie Schooners or Honda Hybrids. In the blink of an eye the planet spins and we are new people, singing an old, old song whose author we have forgotten but whose heartbreaks  and line breaks still echo in our voices. I don't know where I'll go from here...but maybe I'll learn to always be home, nevertheless.

Christina's World by Andrew Wyeth

Palm to earth, thigh to earth, eyes unknown,

Christina’s bones twist toward the home--

that pause of distance, pause

of wind, the wind that whispers

“But where is home, your home?

Where is home?

Your home?”


  
   
Poetry by Julia Heimer Dadds all rights reserved

Picnicking in the Pause

Photo: Lucinda Heimer

While I continued to bury myself in research this summer, I ceased writing. I ceased even in this space--my "free zone." I at least took my leave from with a posting titled "Pause" you can say I took leave with metaphoric fidelity. I spent a fair bit of the summer admiring my garden, along with researching "empathy"--which turned out to be a bit of a rabbit-hole (more metaphoric fidelity!).

My beloved mate and I both had wacky sweet work schedules--his due to a remodeling project at his work, and mine due to gross underemployment (in the name of getting writing done!).  It was too tempting:  We spent a LOT of time just being together and talking.  He even went so far as to call it our second honeymoon.  We may be hungry later in life for this carnal sloth, but I keep thinking about what people regret the most as they lay dying and it is not that they wished they'd worked more.  Because he is verging on the age his older brother departed us; we do indeed have the backdrop of mortality a bit more explicitly painted.  As for what I will regret as I lay dying?  It will not be this summer.  This summer will be a smile upon my face, a small softening around my eyes.  Mark was still declaring he was no longer an artist; I was abstaining from even my creative writing, as if gestating--turned inward, feeding a proto-thought with the intellectual equivalent of ice cream and pickles.  But I digress.  Again.

Part of the pause was due to paws (sorry)--our old dog was becoming ever more feeble with each day.  I was his human--he would wait patiently outside the bathroom door, whine when I whined and greeted me after a multi-day absence as if I had travelled the world and survied against all odds.  It was he, of course, who was surviving.  And I knew I was going to have to bid him farewell soon.  This is not the kind of decision I make by creating a lists of pros and cons.  Of course there is analysis and pragmatic concern:  I need to note and prevent as much as possible, his suffering.  But also, beyond all else, it was a relationship and a decision that rested in an animal logic beyond lists, beyond words, maybe beyond thought.

Like the best of love, our relationship operated at a level barely languaged.  This old dog had seen me through a three-year-long arduous martial separation, the sweet roller coaster of new love, the teen years and young man departures of two sons out of three, the full course of my graduate career as well as 3 jobs and the adaptation and blossoming of a mid-life marriage.  He was patient and loyal through it all.  If I travelled, he would wait outside for me. He knew the vibration of my car engine from a quarter mile away.  Even when his legs got arthritic, he would hop with joy at the prospect of taking a walk in the neighborhood.  He was aghast at the ridiculous new pup we obtained, but he forbore our gauche human propensity to forgive that creature's boorish manners.  He was still king of beneath the dining room table and of my heart and that was all that mattered. 

Kodiak was not especially brilliant or sparkly--he was just plain good-hearted.  And bidding him goodbye was a thought I could barely have.  I think Mark and I were somehow practicing with Kody--we were practicing how to witness flesh being so very mortal, after all.  And so we treasured our place together, our little constellation of beings perched on a hillside on an edge of Sanders.  We delighted in the sound of the creek, the sight of the birds, the blossoms in their idiosyncratic parade.  We delighted in being here.  Here.  Surrounded by beings and by vegetation and air and water and....here.

Here was precious to us this summer.  Here was unique to our concentric array of beloveds, our stage in life, our perched-ness between the past and the future. We reveled in having enough to get by (well, honestly, we're a little behind).  We met with our friends travelling spiritual paths beside us.  We gave shelter to a sick friend who would otherwise be homeless.  We entertained a few couchsurfers.  We said to each other: This is home. Wow, we like our home. We don't want to leave. 

Because we might have to.  I want to be a university teacher and I want to be a scholar and I need to get paid for it and, even more so, we need me to have benefits so that we may have health care.  We're thriving in a funky hippie way, but to keep thriving, I must most likely seek employment in another place.  Because that's how the academy works: One goes, not to a place, but to an institution that aligns with one's research interests.  I get it. 

But that's all about the head!  I have a body, too.  And this body LOVES, is aligned with, functions with joy within the environs and the people of this southern Indiana community. 

I have written quite a bit about my refugee status, here. If there is a place I am "from" it is not southern Indiana.  But I landed in Indiana...and in a rather big city. This was not a good match for me. So I drove south pulling my family along with me, returning to a land that had spoken to me as a young woman.  I found where I and my family could breathe--literally. It was not lost on me that my children needed asthma medicine in the city and not in the small town 55 miles away.  This is not irrelevant. This matters to me.

Matter is indeed an issue, here.  Just as Kody's matter was unhooking itself from integrity....so too does a life that unhooks mind from matter, demands we behave as if we are not beings embedded in our environment. What happens when we behave as if we are only minds skating across the surface of breath? When we hold that understanding we eschew, disavow the most insistent evidence of our material existence--our flesh (our sex, our excretions and flowings, our skin, our organs our muscles and tendons...).  These are, despite our best attempts at segregation, the thread that sews us to the earth.  We may flush what falls from within us away but we are then haunted by the dilemma of how to deal with what is now concentrated waste instead of dispersed and enfolded fertilizer.

I am back to messiness, here.  And that's no mistake.  I do have a composting theory of life.   And it is this: One cannot segment matter, ideas, ways of being, thinking, teaching, learning...into rigid categorization in any permanent way and have that be truth.  It just isn't the way the world works.  It is, as philosopher of science Nancy Cartwright says, "a dappled world."  The plat map does not hold in the face of lived experience upon a folded and rolling landscape.

So we unplatted this summer, ironically on the little square of "our" home (I believe it is TWO banks that can kick us out were we to miss one too many payments--I'm sure they'd view my ponds as burdens and the wild abandon of my garden as mitigating our curb appeal.)  We unplatted our being, and Kody's body followed the dissolving entropic dictates of his DNA. 

I was encouraged not to invite the vet in, to let death find Kody, but we were readying for travel--across thousands of miles and weeks of time.  He would not like this.  I could not bear to think of him,, so old and unable to move--somedays even out of his own puddle of piss--waiting outside for my return.  I could not bear to think of him--shivering in a rainstorm out under the Japanese Maple, waiting. 

So a week before our departure, I asked the vet to help him to depart.  I whispered "good boy" and "thank you" into his old dog ear and he simply ceased to breathe.  We all cried. 

My middle son had spent a week digging through the clay and, after leaving him for an afternoon on the living room floor--me hallucinating his rib cage's rise and fall, my youngest finally able to touch him and say goodbye--we carried him out, lowered him down.  And I covered him with a bathrobe that I've worn since I carried my first son in my womb 25 years ago.  It was so worn through at the shoulders you could spy the skin across my clavicle through an emerald haze of thread.  I'm sure it smelled deeply of me.  That loss--the lowering of Mom's bathrobe into the earth, marked Kody's passing most clearly for my sons, I think. 

How can I leave this place, this land that contains his remains?  How can I leave the tree I planted years ago in a spot that would reveal it to weep gently over the pond that I dug 2 years after planting it?  Kody's body is buried beneath its roots now.  And the pond's dark and flashing world companions our gaze with every glance outside our home's windows.  I fell in love with this land--with its recalcitrant soil, with its hidden karst caves, with its geodes, coyotes, hawks and paw-paws.  What to do with a love of land?  How to take leave when it is perhaps not only a nice idea, but a necessary one? 

I think we rebelled against the call of the necessary this summer.  We tested its boundaries.  We got away with something, with working weirdly so that we could love well....and so that we could say goodbye from within a deep dwelling. I do not regret this.  I realize I may come to do so...but I have those days of long conversation with my mate and the halting stroll towards death with Kody. 

When we finally travelled, at the end of the summer, we crossed the border between Maine and New Brunswick and felt the difference. Wonderingly, we explored another land--full of unfamiliar tidal pulls and strange new formations (I daresay the Bay of Fundy is one of the wonders of the world).  We did this and visited with emigre friends and we saw it:  It is possible to move, to leave, to re-settle and love a new land.  It may happen and better yet, we can imagine it, now. 

Every once in a while, I think of Kody's face, his devoted gaze. I have to realize that he was seeing not the "me" that I see in the mirror but a "her" that I can not even conceptualize.  I see, in my mind's eye, the fixedness of his attention, his simple joy in being recognized, his willingness to just follow beside me and see what happened next, running ahead to sniff out a rabbity adventure or prove his territorial prowess to another canine.  He took each day as if that was all there was and he knew that the land he lived on was that of the pack's being, that of the goddess-of-the-pack's heart--mine.  Of course he loved his home.  But--rescued stray that he was--he knew "home" was revelling in the touch of the beloved, the quick nuzzling on the way through the forest, the rest at the end of the day on the hearth of the heart.  He tutors me, still.


by our Couchsurfing friend: Krist Soojung Fernandez-Kim

all photos by Mark Beebe unless otherwise noted

Emancipation is Messy

Photo: Blood Red Peony

When I worked at Public Health Nursing in Indianapolis, I was sitting one day on the stairway with a teen in our Independent Living Program.  The teen was in foster care and facing what they call, with no small irony in my view, "emancipation."  For big city African American kids seperated early from birth families, sometimes bearng scars from abuse, sometimes just a blank space of bewilderment at absence--this dubious emancipation from a system that held them in often equally abusive limbo is nearly unthinkable.  They are not prepared for adult life and the world of adults is not prepared for them.  The program was a small attempt to ready these young people for yet another harsh reality. It was lamentably small and maddeningly late. 

The story of those young people and what I learned from them warrants a book but what I am interested in here is this moment on the stairway.  I was not well, anemic, in pain and still working. The director--a nurse now managing million dollar budgets instead of millions of charts--saw my pallor and asked if I was okay.  I said I was--just not up to par and joked that "the best of life is messy, right?"  She was nonplussed, repeated my words and chuckled, saying "No, I never thought of it that way. I don't like messy."  And I could tell she did not. 

I had thought that a nurse would understand that the body was an inherantly messy thing--even more so in it's thriving--that of working waste organs, birth and menstruation and sex.  She thought of messes as unsanitary--laden with bacteria and risk.  It took me a while to figure this out--that nurses may actually be in their work to clean up the mess, not accept it and heal it. To be fair, theirs is a dicey business and cleanliness is one of the most potent aids to healing ever discovered.  I just found it intriguing--a glimpse of the paradox of mess. 

I remember a particularly junky little motorcycle repair shop that nestled in the crook of a park area here in Bloomington.  It often had vintage frames, tires and fenders piled in sepia-toned scatterings around the parking lot.  I once sat in that park on a WPA-era limestone picnic table with an anthropology class, discussing politics and springtime while eyeing the jamboree of metal and peeled paint across the road.  I drove by it weekly on my way to study Tibetan Buddhism in old house renovated into the bright yellows, oranges, and blues of the Himalayan sky.  It was a part of my landscape.   Like an the old farmer I once met who wore 3 pairs of overalls, chewed tobacco and had built his home from salvage, board by board--it was unique, a bit smelly and highly practical.

When the city finally fixed its gaze and dollar bills and regulatory desires upon the park, it took only a few months to render that jumbled elbow in the road into a flat spot with a bit of parking.  A friend one day sighed, finally they got that ugly place out of here.

Personally, I mourn the loss of its untidiness.  I suspect the urge to tidiness to be counter to life.  Filth, raw sewage, uncleaned wounds, rancid containers--these are health hazards. And, most probably, this "business" did not have green practices--no doubt the motor oil (at least in decades past) had been conveniently poured into the very soil that filtered the rain into a creek entains yelping, wiggling children in it's winding cascades. And yet....was it really that bad?  Or did it simply not fit in with an aesthetic that had encroached upon it across the years as it went about the work it always had--fixing the old stuff.

It's more the mix I worry about.  I just read an article warning that we may be disinfecting our species into a an unprecedented vulnerability to the microscopically potent--a vulnerability that could reneder us without any defense at all.  In our frenzy of reaction to any "germ" we reveal our defensive array again and again to intruders who adapt in a literal heartbeat.

The excuse for bludgeoning peaceful protests out of parks and campuses this fall 2011 was that they were messy--maybe unsanitary (a challenge they had carefully prepared to meet), full of drug addicts and homeless people.  I despairingly noted in a recent aside "How dare those Occupy people provide a visible place for our sick and homeless to die instead leaving them to the underpasses where we don't have to see them?"

Because that's what messiness does for me and I daresay it does for you, too--it makes visible that real stuff of life.  Salvage yards are not so pretty but is the buried waste heap really safer as it plows the toxins into the soil our aquifer silts through?  Too often what we call "unsanitary" is simply an aesthetic codified.  The mansions' antibiotics and hormones flushed tidily into our rivers and lakes are more likely to kill me than the worms in the unsprayed apple. 

Emancipation from our cultural blind spots is likely to be a messy business. These public square movements certainly are:  We may sit in inconvenient places to get the work done, we may not look so pretty as we push ourselves to be there, even on a bad hair day. And its naive, of course--reinventing the clinic in front of the fast food joint, deciding a dress code for sleeping in a public place. Emancipation may drag forward into the tidy but empty public square what has been eschewed too long:  The noise of equals in negotiation they are unaccustomed to. The awkward lurch of a people told they needn't dance, just watch the professionals on the screen.

Some friends of mine are documenting what they call "Bloomington Fading"--the old buildings from the past that, with faded eaves and failing roofs are disappearing one by one from our once small town.  In their stead, all too often, are parking lots, industrial cubes, roadways full of cars. I'm no romantic for the home that needs repair--I've been cold and wet in my own home a bit too much for that.  What's ugly here is when we write the aesthetic of the wealthy into code, calling it public health (but not funding health publicly) when it's really just a matter of convenience and a preference for the shiny new.

Bloomington Fading:  Once a Dr.'s office now a parking lot for Taco Bell

One thing I learned from those emancipated kids:  Once freed from the system of "care," they always went "home" to their mothers and fathers, just to see, to know what it was they came from, to claim back the messiness of their own story.  They often couldn't/didn't stay, but they weren't ever sorry they did that--look for their "terrible," "incompetent," ramshackle parents and figure out if they could love them.  What does that tell you?

Photo:Blaine Hogan

It tells me that we don't really know messy.

Neighbor Spirits

I am haunted by apparitions of neighborly life. These phantasmal visions involve casseroles, coffee at kitchen tables, the sharing of garden clippers.  Pieces of my congregational church upbringing are woven in, as are 1960's suburban lawn care and cross-cultural kid anthropology. I have lived parts of the fantasy--through my parents' example, through my own childhood, through piquant snippets embedded like gold in the mosaic of my own adult life.

When I first moved to Sanders I had already made friends with the family next door: The daughter of the scholar/farmer on the 300 acres behind us, Hannah and Todd had triplets close to my oldest's age.  Hannah and I shared a love of literature, good food and the background of growing up in idiosyncratic families--family where reading at the dinner table was chuckled at, even as the surreptitious book was confiscated. Hannah 's versions of Apricot and Banana "Coffee" Cakes are imbued with butter, melting so rapturously on the tongue third helpings are heedless of the hips. She could make anything, and I mean anything, from "scratch."

When I was pregnant with the my only Sanders boy, Hannah and I took a morning walk nearly every day over to her parent's place.  We'd walk the mile over, sit and sip a sinfully strong cup of coffee while her dad and I commiserated about politics. Then we'd head on back to wake up kids and husbands.  The neighbors' big dogs we'd stirred up on on way over, were placid and friendly when they caught our familiar scent on return.

Similarly, I renewed an acquaintance from what I refer to "my prior Bloomington incarnation" (a residency just over 10 years prior to moving here "permanently" in 1995).  We were pleased to haltingly recognize one another and when I asked where he lived he said "oh it's no where you'd know down south of town." You know the story.  It was Sanders.  Our sons ran the nearby quarries together through a summer or so of muddy clothes, tall fish tales and stem to stern bug bits. I built a friendship with Ken's wife, Mel.  I had idealized Mel in my prior incarnation--she shined with all the burnished goodness of a back-to-the-garden values. Accomplished at herbalism, massage therapy and homesteading (and beautiful, as well), Mel exemplified a no-nonsense earth mother ethos that had traction for me.  Sure enough, over 10 years later, her family life was immaculately tended in a tiny but cheerful home where she home-schooled as needed, managed a well-nourished family on dimes to most folks dollars, reading deep thoughts and walking to mull them over daily.  When I was caught by surprise by my Sanders pregnancy, I sought Mel's kitchen counsel. When my husband lost job number 3 in as many quarters, she poured me mint tea.  One idyllic Halloween we trouped around Sanders trick or treating, reunited our broods on their living room floor, popped organic popcorn and cued up The Haunting of Hill House to spook ourselves. The kids conducted complex candy trades that any market day stall owner would admire as we sipped mulled cider. 

I think my neighbors' deaths shook me this year because my distance from the events echoed with hauntings of these memories...and the fact that they are just memories.  These days, neighbors mostly nod and drive by, chatting on cell phones as they near their driveways. While I do stop by to check on an 84 year old neighbor lady, I don't have a clue how elderly Pentacostal matriarch next door neighbor is faring.

I doubt my neighbors know how much I'm rooting for them.  I want them to be okay.  When there's shouting across the street and the sheriff arrives, yet again, I am heart-sore.  But they don't want me asking, really.  Their cousin down the road can say it--"alcoholism, pure and simple"...but simplicity leaves out parts of the tragedy that we all share--alcoholic or not. There are tangles of neglect, abuse, depression, wage slavery, militarism, religious guilt, untreated disease.  When I referenced Wisconsin Death Trip earlier, it was not happenstance. That story is about a time when disease rose simultaneously with incomes crashing and weather disasters that destroyed crops, homes, well-being and there were few, if any, formal systems of support.  Sound familiar?

Now, thanks to complex political maneuverings I don't wish to dissect here, we've managed to land back into a similar set of circumstances and the toll is similar: Disease that could be treated claims the uninsured (and the poorly insured...which accounts for most of us), along with our houses and our children's futures. Abuse and neglect ride the tailwinds of drink, drugs, denial, as houses start to empty when banks reclaim what they were so willing to over-mortgage just a year or so ago. I worry when I see the sheriff pull up across the street.  And sometimes I worry when the sheriff doesn't. 

Pause

 

Some silences spin worlds.

My husband and I agree it may have been the most communicative pause in a talk that we'd ever heard.  At the meeting a 30-something year old professional man, handsome--healthy-looking, dressed in a snappy shirt and tie--had recounted how, several years ago, he, after over a year of the surprising grace of sobriety, decided that drinking his In-law's vodka was a good idea. He then woke up the next morning (we can guess that morning's sensations from the look on his face) and took his daughter fishing.  He paused.  Looked down,; Looked inward. Paused...some...more...breathed.  Paused, again.

In that pause, we sat in a little boat with him and his daughter.  Our heads throbbed, our hearts twisted tight like old fishing line, it was hard to swallow. Dawn's damp hung in the air  along with the desultory chatter of a content girl.  A crow called out from shoreline brush, oars bumped wood in small lappings of water. The sight of bright bobbers upon dark water, the small fingers of a girl cradling a fat, red worm... reminded us of the tiny, ineffable delights of this world.  The knife edge of despair glints in our vision of this moment.  Pause....

pause.....








When he speaks we are not sure we are ready. We are afraid to lose sight of that knife edge and of the tiny delights.  We are grateful that he let us sit there, in that pause, in the boat.

Then he said, "And that probably saved my life."
Ah.
We knew that. 
 
I write poetry, not because I like to be obtuse, not because of some tradition of intellect, not because it's beautiful. It's because it's the only way for me to say certain things.  There are silences in poetry.  Spaces.  Pauses.  That's why it looks that way on a page (one of the many queries from the poetry-daunted, "Why does it look like that?").  My husband is in an even less enviable postion as an abtract painter: invariably several visitors to an opening will squint, turn to him and say "What does it mean?"

What did that silence mean in this man's story?  It means a fishing trip.  It means worms, water, hangover, prayer. It means despair. It means a child and her father.  It means the impossible.  It means rowing.

It is the silence the artist Galindo keeps as she trails bloody footprints from court to jailhouse, to police station to town square (see first post). It is the pause I feel each time I drive by the departed Rosie's forlorn gas pumps at the entrance of my street.  It is the pause of  Borges before he turns blindly towards us, to recite another verse. 

When I drop a pebble through a water's surface, there is a silence as it drifts down--visible and then not. The pause that emerges within me at that moment means everything. I cannot tell you what it means to you, though.

I do know that in that pause--not more than a couple of minutes--more than that one man's life was saved.

You can learn as much - or more - from one glance at a private space as you can from hours of exposure to a public face.
 (Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, 2005)

Painting: Point of Departure--by Mark Beebe
Royal Art Lodge; Little Sweets Series
Photography: Mark Beebe

Me and Borges

When I was 21, I did not go to Majorca.



photo: Ronald Shakepear



Memory

Eduardo invited me to go with him to Majorca
the night we ate paella with Borges.

 

"You have to 'front load that'," opined my husband Mark when reading my recent aside that Borges had once confided a love of the English language to me.  "You can't just casually say that Borges--Borges-- told you this and have it be the last sentence in the paragraph!"  "Listen," I soothed, "that's an important insight the man had, it fit there. It's his insight, it means something extra coming from him and I'll explain it in the next chapter." So I'm explaining.  Or, at least, I'm telling you the story.

I was a drop out undergraduate at Indiana University.  But I'd stayed long enough to be a work-study aide at a preschool where I befriended a teacher who was (then) married to an Argentinian scholar.  Later, when they divorced, he and I met at a poetry reading and he invited me and a girlfriend to dinner with, yes, Jorge Luis Borges. Eduardo (a psuedonym) was enough older than me that I was both flattered and wary of his attentions.  But he really understood my writing--something rare and precious for a poet--and he invited me to dinner with Borges.

We had drunk brandy late into the night, him telling
me stories of the Tango while the music itself played, the music

that allowed men to dance with each other in a lonely
land, lonelier now that torture played the music.


He quoted my own poetry to me—“o window light of next to next”
Even then
I couldn’t land in love with him.

Borges was amazing.  Like Funes the Memorious, he seemed to remember every word, every lilt and story.  He recited his own poetry for what seemd forever. I could have listened that long.  It took searching through files, not my own mind, to find my own poem about this extraordinary evening.  Borges stored his library in his mind, shared it gently and generously. He was a librarian, he said--a blind librarian.   I was nonplussed when he asked for me to recite my own poetry.  I simply could not.  Not only was the sangria blurring my memory, but to recite to Borges?  My own writing?  Even now it would astound me.  Even now, I would be hard pressed to call up a complete work from memory.  

Self-Portrait by Borges

He had no eyesight left, leaned upon the beautiful
woman’s arm. She wore fur even in the spring warmth.
Shadowed across this--my own mother’s slow movement into
blindness, her mind racing the darkness 
--memorizing our faces, her favorite scripture, the strategic
outlines of furniture, mapping memory
before apeture betrayed her.

It was a sweet and confusing night and I was in way over my head. Like an echo of a meloncholic song, the incredible potency of the two men's shared homeland--Argentina-- shadowed the evening. Eduardo had fled because of the repressive political climate. People were disappearing simply for being in the academy.* But Borges was unhappy with both sides of the divide. I knew enough to know that I couldn't fathom the poignancy of their histories, their losses, their loves, their interests.

Earlier in the evening Borges recited stanza upon
stanza of his own, extolled his favorites, the lineage of thought
and beauty. He inclined his head gently to me, asked me to recite
my poems; I stammered, finding no handhold
in my shadows. He chuckled
and noted that he often did not remember his own, as well,
and kindly turned away.

I had never heard of, much less eaten, paella before. I got a bit tipsy on sangria and, late that night, long after everyone had left and the tango music had quieted, Eduardo did indeed invite me to go to Majorca. It seemed an exotic temptation--Mai-YOURrr-ka;  even the name is spoken with unfamiliar accents and lilting phonemes not found English. However, I was shy about the implied relationship such a journey might encourage. I guess I liked Eduardo and myself enough to be honest about that; in what seemed a clearer morning light, I decided not to go.

Oddly enough, my mother encouraged me to go.  At the time I thought she was naive.  Now I consider her strange openess to me travelling overseas with a man she'd never even met a sign of her own sense of adventure.  A girl born to Bostonian wealth, she eschewed that and most acceptable feminine roles to become a minister and a leader nationally in a Christian denomination.  She obtained her ordination with failing vision, travelled around the world teaching--even while unable to decipher airport postings or read her own itinerary--and completed her career as a Pastor in a small church in London, nearly blind.  (I joke with her, now, "I'm going to use the 'B' word, Mom" as we negotiate her current needs and ventures.)  I watched my mother--chased by loss--memorize her moments, our faces, writing and speaking into an increasingly invisible world. In the pause that grows as vision and mind distance from one another, a kind of raw ululation sounds in the heart.  

I didn’t go to Spain and only a few bones of my own lyric
tent into the noise. Yesterday's landscape turns to grainy
fade—like the end of an old travelogue. Blind or not, in remembering,
it is the resolute throat of loss that gropes through,
leaning on slender arms.


Now, decades and husbands and lovers gone by, I wonder what might have come of such an adventure.  We never really know how to apprehend a moment.  Hindsight is not, I think, 20/20. In fact sight itself is a sense I have learned to examine a bit more critically.  The scholar Phil Carspecken writes eloquently on "occularcentrism and phonocentrism" pointing out how the metaphors of sight and speech permeate our language and thought about knowledge He says this belieis a some assumptions about the foundations of knowledge that cannot be logically supported.  One might say he is suggesting that our sight obscures our visions, our speech confuses our understandings. 

Nadie rebaje a lágrima o reproche
esta declaración de la maestría
de Dios, que con magnífica ironía
me dio a la vez los libros y la noche.

No one should read self-pity or reproach
Into this statement of the majesty
Of God; who with such splendid irony,
Granted me books and blindness at one touch.

Jorge Luis Borges

I had forgotten about Majorca...but not Borges.  As a poet, I began with his poetry and as a mother, a divorcee, a worker, a ctizen, a lover, a teacher and a scholar, I gained a new love of his prose.  I am now married to a surrealist/abstract painter and graphic narrative writer who deeply loves Borges fiction:  Of course he felt my evening with Borges bore more attention.  I think Borges himself, though, would have liked that he--great man, great mind--was an aside in an meditation on belonging and the many "languages"--including that of place--that are involved in such a notion. 

My mother lost her own vision so slowly that her brain compensated in heroic ways to fill in the missing pieces. For years, she "saw" mostly with her mind, her mind's memory and inventive logic. Now that all "sight" has left, she sometimes sees text swooping across her "vision;" sometimes even in French--a language she once spoke and read with some skill.  "I see the strangest things, now," she marvels, "It's a bit tiring."I am more than sympathetic to Phil Carspeken's questioning of our senorsy "centrisms"; in fact, my own orientation to knowlege argues for a better sense of embodiment--of the whole body being acknowledged when we consider knowledge, wisdom and life. But it is a tall order, I think.  In some ways, Borges forged a unique way through this dilemma with his fantastical, labyrinthian, origami puzzles of storying.  He told stories that turned the idea of story, or narrtive and memory, on it's head.  Perhaps it was no coincidence that he began this approach after a traumatic head injury and infection.  I wonder what new facet of mind he experienced?  And then, with the ocular faded to black, what is left? 

Perhaps what is left are the traces of what we call memory--the sight of a smile, the sound of laughter, the taste of paella,  the smell of the ocean, the feel of sun-warmed wind upon our skin. Or in lieu of that...the idea of it, the dream of the memory.

In the late 1960s and the early 1970s, Marxist-Leninist militias such as People's Revolutionary Army utilized aggressive tactics that sometimes resulted in violence.[36] Later the military government used these acts as justification for their even more brutal measures. The "ideological war" doctrine of the Argentine military focused on eliminating the social base of insurgency. In practice that meant assassinating many middle class students, intellectuals and labor organizers, most of whom had few ties to the guerrillas.




The costs of what the armed forces called the "Dirty War" were high in terms of lives lost and basic human rights violated. Thousands of deaths may be attributed to various guerrilla attacks and assassinations. The 1984 Commission on the Disappeared documented the disappearance and probable death at the hands of the military regime of about 11,000 people, relatively few of whom were likely Montonero or ERP cadres. Human rights groups estimate that over 30,000 persons were "disappeared" (e.g. arrested, tortured, and secretly executed without trial) during the 1976–1983 period; many more went into exile.[citation needed] The People's Revolutionary Army alone admitted it lost 5,000 militants.[41]


Serious economic problems, mounting charges of corruption, public discontent and, finally, the country's 1982 defeat by the United Kingdom in the Falklands War following Argentina's unsuccessful attempt to seize the Falkland Islands all combined to discredit the Argentine military regime. Under strong public pressure, the junta lifted bans on political parties and gradually restored basic political liberties.


His work embraces the "character of unreality in all literature."[2] His most famous books, Ficciones (1944) and The Aleph (1949), are compilations of short stories interconnected by common themes such as dreams, labyrinths, libraries, fictional writers, religion and God. His works have contributed to the genre of magical realism, a genre that reacted against the realism/naturalism of the nineteenth century.[3][4][5] In fact, critic Angel Flores, the first to use the term, set the beginning of this movement with Borges's Historia universal de la infamia (1935).[6] Scholars also have suggested that Borges's progressive blindness helped him to create innovative literary symbols through imagination.[7] His late poems dialogue with such cultural figures as Spinoza, Camões, and Virgil.

His international fame was consolidated in the 1960s, aided by the "Latin American Boom" and the success of Gabriel García Márquez's Cien Años de Soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude).[3] Writer and essayist J. M. Coetzee said of him: "He, more than anyone, renovated the language of fiction and thus opened the way to a remarkable generation of Spanish American novelists."[8]


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jorge_Luis_Borges

Jorge Luis BORGES (Argentinian, 1899 - 1986) Self-portrait. ink on paper; 8 3/4 x 6 inches (225 x 150 mm) From the collection of Burt Britton. Borges was nearly blind when he drew this for Britton.


Jorge Luis Borges, Seven Nights, A New Directions Book, 1984. Page 110.