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 the 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.

Plat Map of Our Mind(s)

I have an unpacking problem.  Every time I return from travel, the suitcase sits for weeks, half unpacked.  Thus it has always been for me; like an army kid I cannot say clearly where I am “from.” 

Upwardly mobile ministerial parents, having to go where the church made a good match for them, packed and unpacked me through a peripatetic childhood.  I suppose this and the resultant bridging to new communities and their cultures have given direction to my musings on the shades, shadows and illuminations of belonging.

"Here in the tentacles of April night
as I round the last bend towards home,
reflected headlamp beams scurry up a pole
glistening in the drench  and for a moment
I see something alive
making away...."

I don't know where I belong. I don't know if I belong here, here in a semi-rural area that I moved to with great effort, finally seeming to choose my home.  I don't manage the land well, it manages me.  And the natives, generationally embedded here, eye me as the one likely to report them to animal control, however untrue that is. In a natural disaster, we'd shelter together; in a civil war, we might not. But I know I love this place still, unreasonably, like an asylum-seeker loves her new land. I study the soil and the greenery, bemusedly learning from their intractability, loving them anyway for being real after so long a dwelling in the mirage of urban wasteland dreaming. But I know I'm an immigrant, translating always.  Will I always be partially unpacked/packed?   

I know that you believe that you understood what you think I said, but I am not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant. (attributed to Robert McCloskey, State Department spokesman)

Perhaps I am about done here--in the only community I chose for myself and my family. Certainly the “terminal” degree I am pursuing suggests that.  As well, the community and I have our mutual disenchantments; like a frayed marriage, the accumulated stutterings of dark projections, fatigued efforts may be too trapped a dance. Is the best next step for me a bowing back from the music, a walk away from the dance hall?  I don’t know. My ancestors moved on from here to there, making bold moves from homeland to "frontier" to escape old patterns, new oppressions. How do we know it's time to move on?

"...Pulling in, the illumined shapes of Redbud,
hillside, chipped doorway are all the same, but I
--having turned,  having seen—
am not..."

I've written in past postings of several borderlines and their crossings--city and country, "racial" demarcations, the borderlands of life and death, daily life and grievous sorrow.  Borderlands are special places:  The academics I enjoy talk about the "liminal"--people, places, perspectives that are unsettled, outside, hybrid.  Like my son's multi-racial girlfriend identified as such simply because her skin is a darker hue and her hair kinked and yet who grew up rural, home-schooled--a confluence of "types" that just can't hold their boundaries in the face of her lived reality. 

My sons are probably multi-racial, too.  I've dug enough through the geneological dirt to find not only the relationships to Mayflower ancestors, but also the Eastern European ancestors with suspiciously Judaic names and dusky skin, the fuzzy spots in the matrilineal heritage where "founder" settlers and the aboriginal already-settled may have quietly settled together.  The human genome project's exploration of our inner sequencing points to how we all carry the synchopations of a myriad of "races," histories, cultures.  The lines of race, of belonging, are not very straight.  Indeed, the DNA molecule itself is a twisty spiral of interlocking and over-lapping.  There's a reason it's a family "tree" not a family grid--as we trace back further and further, there are entwinements that confound, crossings that complicate, often obscured by name-change erasures, the blurring of migrations. 

When colonization marched across the U.S., land, even rugged land, was claimed by the newcomers and etched onto plat maps in irregular rectangles and trapezoids. Even so, many places--like here where our little squares of 1-acre plots trace the sinuous curve of Ramp Creek and its steep ravine--mountains, flood plains, rivers and lakes sometimes shoulder aside such artifice. 

Were we to follow the land (and how we actually use it, walk it, draw from it and dwell on it) rather than claim it, our plat maps would swirl and whirl like cloud formations.  Instead, we've place a grid upon the planet pretending that we can override the tidal flows of land and water.  The ongoing peril New Orleans faces from the river, the oceans and the flow of weather is just one example that gives lie to this posturing.  

I am unsure of what is a healthy approach to making a home: When is it time to migrate, when to settle?  Bruce Chatwin, explorer and writer, was convinced that humans were really meant to be nomadic and Pilosophers Gilles Deleuze and Guattari used the term nomadic along with de- and re-territorialization as keys to a philosophy that eschewed straightlines--through space, time, even thought. *  They say "A path is always between two points, but the in-between has taken on all the consistency and enjoys both an autonomy and a direction of its own."

Perhaps I am not so much interested in the borderlands as I am in gaining this nomadic "be here now" sensibility?  I've become such a student of transition spaces and margins that I advise my transitioning friends to.."consider change a 'worm hole'--a warp speed place where the usual "natural laws" don't apply." As well, though, I consider the borderlands and transition spaces incredibly poignant. The edge of them points to endings and endings call for elegies. This is the sad music that is so beautiful one cannot stop listening, quiet tears welling.  Sometimes such a moment is very still--an elongation of time even to the point of time stopping. 

To not belong is a belonging, too--to not belonging.  Fanon, writing insightfully of the psychology and sociology of the colonized,  describes of this odd layering of identity into a non-identity that is an identity. This complication of identity is important to understand in an atmostphere of increasingly subtle and pervasive corporate colonizations. Economic and social globalization bring along their nasty henchman of physical and psychic colonization with every encroaching step.  In Haiti, babies die of malnutrition because formula is marketed to mothers unable to afford it. In Chicago, having the name-brand jacket may trump having the rent.  The talismans of colonial "belonging" are insidious, clutched in the hope we will not be seen as "other."

To think like an "other," to find that other in us and know that the right-angled plat lines are just a kind of pretending, to know that, even as we yearn for a homeland, nature will altering the contours of our dwelling...these are all nomadic acts of reclaiming our minds. 

I wrote earlier about the death of some neighbors, untimely and tragic, who's familial roots sink deeply here, locally.  If we move on, the folks across the street will note it mostly with worry about what kind of difference will move into our place.   

 

"...Closing one door, I move to the next--

open and return."

My suitcase remains half-unpacked (or half-packed?), like my mind.  Am I coming or going?  A settler?  An emmigrant? An immigrant? A native?  Am I all of these, instantiated only in moments, moving across the landscape of belonging? This is the way a creek moves; changing course across time, following the sinuous contours of where it may flow the swiftest--always the creek, but never the same waters.

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

Poem: Returning to a Place Called Home by Julia Heimer Dadds

Photos:  Katie Thompson original chair found at:

http://interiordesignsense.com/tag/chairs/page/6/
Mark Beebe  "Wall Flower in London"

Mississsippi River meanderings U.S. Geological Survey

 

*"The nomad has a territory; he follows customary paths; he goes from one point to another; he is not ignorant of points (water points, dwelling points, assembly points, etc.). But the question is what in nomad life is a principle and what is only a consequence. To begin with, although the points determine paths, they are strictly subordinated to the paths they determine, the reverse happens with the sedentary. The water point is reached only in order to be left behind; every point is a relay and exists only as a relay. A path is always between two points, but the in-between has taken on all the consistency and enjoys both an autonomy and a direction of its own. The life of the nomad is the intermezzo." ( Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. A Thousand Plateaus; Capitalism and Schizonphrenia. Massumi, B. trans. University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, Minnesota, p.380)

I am a Bad God

It's a scandal--our yard.  It's clear we're not good at this--this edge-of-country life.  The fence line has grown up in willy-nilly volunteer trees--weedy Hackberry, undisciplined Locust and the sneakiest weed of the tree family--Maple with it's baby-haired pistils raining "helicopter" seeds that sprout in the gutters, weighing them near a breaking point.  I don't mind....much.  I am an Émigré to the green.

This is a semi-country life is somewhere between "All Creatures Great and Small" and "Winter's Bone"--neither simply idyllic nor only brutal but, somehow, both.


Through my view to the west I see an expanse of green that backs up to the 600 sq. foot domicile of my next door neighbor to the East, Mrs. Beal.  On the East side of the house, 1/2 acre of woods buffer between our driveway and our "next door" neighbors.  Strewn about beneath that tangled canopy of sycamore and hickory draped heavy with wild grape vines--thick as a carpenter's arm-- are old car parts, empty cans, even a bathroom mirror and a rusted remnant of long forlorn vehicle.

Warren is my neighbor to the back--across a steep ravine valley--and owner of the creek and cows that meander at the bottom of my "back yard."  He says the kids with little to eat once gobbled the onion-like Ramp plant; its aroma permeated the children's bodies so pungently that the schools tried to prohibit Ramp eating.  Now Ramps are a delicacy in East Coast Nouveau Cuisine. In our valley today, it's Ramp Creek that's flooded and whooshing with the sound of distant applause, swollen with rains that topped off and left sloshing my garden pond. The frogs and goldfish nudge curiously at new contours.

I am a Bad God.

I create the world and it languishes—so loved ,

yet so rampant,  overblown.  The bees in the Comfrey

startle me—swarming and furious in their work.

Even waters befuddle:  How much muck is good—

sheltering the tadpoles, lending humus

to the water lily?   How much is dreck—

forcing fish from depths to sun scald, tannins toughing

silken pools to murked burlap?

As a gardener I may be a bad god, but, as a resident,  I am a refugee. Landscapes are languages we live in--their features become articulations of our psyches...or do our psyches become articulations of our landscapes?  I fled the insistent debate and clipped diction of city life and now I am mouthing my way into my version of heaven.  A patois of greens--emerald to chartreuse, khaki to olive to lime--splay across my living room view. Still parched for this even after 18 years,  I gulp in the vision:  Tight furls of fern nestle among last autumn's fallen gold and the Redbuds blink fuchsia through verdant tangles of verging wild raspberry.  Ivory Dogwood's petal heart shaped hands open to misted air. Goldfish flicker and glint in the cool pond depths while the scarlet of the Cardinal startles out from the fence brush.  Jorge Luis Borges once told me that he preferred English to his native tongue: "There are so many more words," he marveled wistfully, "so many more choices because of all the conquerors, conquests and immigrants it has adopted."

The language of this land is my retreat, my hospital, my home. After failing abysmally to grow anything in the ruin of city soil, over-shaded by ancient mulberries and mined with the detritus of a century's worth of peeled paint, cinders, broken glass and household pourings, here I am an overwhelmed amateur in a buoyant garden nearly overrun by gangling woods.

I don’t weed well;  I prune even worse. 

Raspberry threatens renegade action, Maple

seedlings are insurgent, even the butterfly bush 

becomes woody and indelicate.

My neighbors were flabbergasted when I took down a perfectly good chain link fence that stretched across the front yard.  Their notion of tidy is a bit slash and burn, which--I admit--might improve my odds against immanent honeysuckle takeover.  They've been amused by my Tibetan prayer flags, too--one young teen even asking if they were some sort of new Nascar thing or what?

Across the street Manny's girlfriend before last, the second (or was it third?) one after his wife left, asked shyly about my sunflowers. She looked a bit startled when I said they were volunteers sprouting from the fallen seed from the bird feeder.  The next spring they had a few out front as well and I felt an oddly worried pleasure--did I start something?  And, if so, what? 

Is it cruel to feed the chickadee and goldfinch?

 For the hawk shadow thrills me--above

like a benediction

before the kill.   

I have two garden ponds.  The first I put in simultaneously along with digging up two-thirds of the 25 foot wide x 200 foot long front swath of yard.  My second husband--a new resident of the house--called it Mom's Folly.  It was a seething mud-pit for over a month until I could haul in pea gravel for paths, gather the humus to sculpt mounds for planting (unamended soil is so clay-laden we can make pots of it). It looked pretty tidy, nearly British, for that first year.

Now the paths have been overtaken by an array of greenery and the gardened part is a riot of surprise perennials, the encroaching sprawl of Rose-of-Sharon, other invasive. That's probably when I crossed the good ol' girl line in the neighbors' view, when I dug holes in the ground, lined them with rubber, water and goldfish and let the rest of it go pretty much the way it wants. It appears that holding back the wilderness takes a level of force I'm not skilled at or keen on--chainsaws, burnings, chemicals.  We don't even rake.  

The glaciers forgot or could not defeat the trunk

of bedrock beneath this local land.  Elsewhere--

rolling fields east and west, loose black soil north;

fertility beckoned and, like the aboriginal

of every invaded land, the trees fell quickly

and forever,  Corn and soybean geometried

sheared lands.  Not here.

The benefit of my land management pacifism is that we are surrounded by creatures--Red-wing and Cooper's hawks drift in the updraft, goldfinch, chickadee, nuthatch and titmouse flash from feeder to bush to branch.  Deer meander through now and again along with raccoon, wild turkey, fox, rabbit, coyote. There are pairs of cardinals, robins, and mourning doves I swear I recognize along with the summer hummingbirds with their scarlet neckerchiefs, musketeer dueling amongst throaty blooms.

Don’t get me wrong; I know all this nature will kill me.  The hawks picked off my chickens one by one and the coyotes snatched my neighbor Huck’s prize rabbits, angering him enough that he learned a coyote call.  One night he drove up and down the road, unworldly warbles emanating from his truck, a rifle in his lap. My home will disintegrate soon if we don’t root out the damp, cut disruptive roof-line lilac, bolster the tilted retaining wall.  As natural as is spring profusion so is the inevitability of decay.  Rust never sleeps.

Here the horizon heaves with Paw-Paw, Black Walnut,

Hickory, Persimmon, Wild grape snaking through it all--

the Celtic knot upon the letter of the limb.  Across each

acre, ravines and rock surprise us, resist us.  Here

we scrabble for a living.  The land does not easily yield.

Nevertheless as an immigrant, an asylum-seeker--I am a nature patriot.  When I first moved here, I would wander into the woods and perch on a rock for hours.  Even with the junkyard remnant in sight, I would marvel.  I was a woman rescued from a desert trek that had collapsed, parched and dying.  In the middle of Indy, both of my young children gasped, dependent on the the asthma nebulizers to keep their airways open. We had a bullet hole in our ceiling and even my Impatiens died from lack of light in the shadows of close-set houses.

We were "urban camping" as my husband put it--and that meant waking up to drunks on the porch on Sunday mornings and possums sneaking through the unsound roofing, along with soot-stained rain. I'm not sure when or how I came to a decision point to move away, but when I did it felt like an act of will and it took everyone in our lives helping us to move from city chaos to country chaos.  But now here, I'm not sure if I'll ever belong...or should.

The Reverend Billy Talen street activist and teacher from The Church of After Shopping says this about the "wilderness" and the Western European conquest of it: Our "gods" were...

"...supposed to defeat Appalachia, and the Ohio Valley after that, and the Mississippi and the Great Plains and Rockies and the Golden State and the Moon, but the Promised Land receded into the distance like a white whale the size of pixel. The pillar of fire that was supposed to get us home – the GPS was on the fritz. And then our Eden caught us from behind. It turned out to our surprise that the Promised Land was never in front of us. The Promised Land caught us from behind because it was an inside job, the seeds and eggs and screaming birds. There is an Eden inside us, and we know there is."

When I first moved to Sanders, my neighbor through the west wood was a mother of triplets, daughter of the farmer behind us.  This edge of country living had long lost any appeal for her; she dreamed of quick trips to the grocery and houses with no hidden wildlife scurrying in the eaves.  We would take walks up and down the road and over to her father's farm, attempting to trim our shape, share book reading lists and commiserate on child-rearing.  We could sympathize in so many ways except how we felt about living here on our road.  As a native--born in a house that didn't have running water 'til later, trudging to the local school full of ramp-scented country-kids--she seemed tired, longing. And me?  I was smitten.   


Even so, I love

it all with the eye of a mother who

only sees the original child, 

with the heart of a lover who only  knows

that she loves, not how to, or why.

My neighbor did move into town and I'm still here, years later. Ambivalently fluent in country, she quickly acquired the syllables of a small city life. Ambivalently fluent in city, I still clumsily cobble together my pidgen translation of these woods, despite their cavalier treatment of my yard. Right now, night has misted in, mercifully blurring my homesteading neglect, allowing cool breath through the windows. Peepers have begun to trill, their waltzing vibrato punctuated with the banjo bwonk of bullfrog and the occasional shusssh of late home-comer's tires on rain soaked road.  Perhaps I'll never be good at this--always speaking country with an accent--but for now, I'll revel in this Promised Land's creole sounds within me,  "belonging" in my own temporary way.

There is still some mystery here:

the peculiar moaning of the wind, even

on a still night, the yipping of coyotes

said to appear in ghostly gatherings

silhouetted against the neighbor’s open

field.

This rock is rooted to a time when only

the wind evolved and coyotes were just a dream within

the wind’s dark eyes and we were but a phantasm,

a haunting beyond even the wind’s imagination.

 Photos by Mark Beebe



"I am a Bad God" and "Bloomington, Indiana--Thanksgiving Night" by Julia Heimer Dadds
Reverend Billy's Easter Sermon: http://www.facebook.com/home.php#!/note.php?note_id=10150171825821912  uploaded April 24, 2011
                                                                                                                

Pass/words

SHIBBOLETH

One didn't know the name of Tarzan's monkey.
Another couldn't strip the cellophane
From a G.I.'s pack of cigarettes.

By such minutiae were the infiltrators detected.

By the second week of battle
We'd become obsessed with trivia.
At a sentry point, at midnight, in the rain,
An ignorance of baseball could be lethal.


The morning of the first snowfall,
I was shaving, Staring into a mirror nailed to a tree,
Intoning the Christian names of the Andrews Sisters.
"Maxine, Laverne, Patty."
                                      Michael Donaghy, Poetry*

"Pass" is an interesting word--it's extraordinarily versatile.  One might say that the word "pass" is passing strange (a fun yet archaic phraseology).  I can pass as in a lane, I can pass on having some of that haggis (thanks but no thanks), pass a class, a kidney stone, muster.  I can complete or dodge a pass, as well pass by, through, over, around. I can pass away.

In a racialized world there are people who pass for being of a "race" that might otherwise not be assigned to them. The use of that meaning of "passing" is commonly associated with African Americans describing folks passing as white and is documented in 1935. It originates in use as in "pass oneself off as" in 1809. In other words, when we pass as we internalize a movement through and around our identity in order to project something altered and outwards as our identity. Concerns around these notions of "passing" was especially acute in 19th century New Orleans, where the extraordinary confluence of cultures and colors produced such human variety in appearance that it altered the racial vocabulary throughout the nation and the era.

Sometimes at the gate we must offer a "password."  But once we pass and enter daily life,  there is the shibboleth--the test of pronunciation that gives lie to one's belonging or estrangement.  In the biblical passage the pronunciation of the the word "shibboleth"*** by refugees from a war was the marker of belonging; know it and live, mispronounce and die.  In old New Orleans the shibboleths had names like "octaroon" to denote degrees of racial complexity (and expected accompanying social behavior)and gens de couleur libres, free from the start and rendering moot the simplistic shibboleth of skin tones adding layered challenges of historical and linguistic interplay.  In old New Orleans one wanted to speak with an accent, be fluent in French. 

These ideas--passing for, passing through-- checked me when I recently visited the city of New Orleans.  In order to make the most of that visit I felt I needed to remember how I carried myself in a former life living in downtown Indianapolis.  I needed to pass for/as (at least) a street-wise visitor, someone not worth messing with as I wended my way through a French Quarter festival.

As my city ways came back to me, I reflected on my fear of the city as a kind of "stuck-up-ness"--an estrangement tinged with judgment. The term "siddity" surfaced--a term taught to me by the elder African American women I worked with when I lived in downtown Indy.  These women were old enough that many remembered crossing the Mason-Dixon line with family to find work during the Depression and World War II.  

These women knew the siddity--folks who denied their past and put on airs, viewing as lesser the very people who helped them get their new positions in life. Someone who's siddity is nervous about remembering where she comes from, tries to claim belonging in world she's moving to not from.  Siddity-ness claims this displaced belonging in a way that renders that already impossible belonging even more impossible. The siddity are "faking it." This leaves the siddity people without belonging. Labeling someone siddity carries its own smugness, as well, being breezy in its tone of knowing that the siddity ones lose what is most precious--belonging anywhere--in the end.

As a white gal, I might have no business looking for the siddity in me; there's no belonging for me in the lexicon of African-American social life.  But this white gal found it useful to learn what I could from a new world of racial awareness.  I was dropped into the midst of a racialized high-school when I was 16. (That I could make it to 16 without a lived racial awareness points to my white privilege.)  This once near-suburban school in Indy had recently been white-flighted into a majority black population.** And I had just moved there from another city. The layers of reaction/interaction, denial and disavowal around this population shift were confusing and fascinating. Besides learning not to "cut my eyes" at anyone (looking too long or closely), I also learned to listen to the unique languages around me; my inner poet was inspired by the sly lexicons and spoken rhythms of my African American schoolmates.

I don't remember hearing the old fashioned word "siddity" until working with the elders. I was a stranger in their strange land, too--a young white mother working with grand-parent-aged African American women and men. So they patiently explained things to me, like siddity, jazz and gospel music, and how to get by in hard times (the little, really important things).

They taught me that it was considered rude to pass by a black person on the street without making eye contact and saying "Hi.  How are you?"  That was a revelation.  The white practice of a curt nod, or even aversion of the eyes--essentially what's considered polite distance in the white city world--is, or at least was (I've been small town/rural for a while here), considered cold and stand-offish in the black city world.  The office manager once explained it to me:  If you're black--even if you're different from one another in many ways--you share the way the white world treats you because of your skin tone; you recognize a related, even familial-flavored humanity in one another...in a world that otherwise won't. 

As the poem above notes, in times and places of heightened hostility, knowing the right words, the nuanced signal, might keep you alive. "The devil is in the details:"  Our signaling of threat, of dominance or privilege, rests in the gesture, the eyes, the cant of the body; these are the signals that get us through the checkpoint.   Indeed, with a new awareness of how the others might prefer to be addressed on city streets, I travelled through Indy, D.C., New York and Boston, with a different eye to and a different greeting for the people around me.  But our belonging is carried in the details--the pronunciation, knowledge of baseball, musicians and singers--these are the things that allow us to settle in, cleared of deadly label "infiltrator." 

There are plenty of "wanna-bes" (wanna belong) for black culture and other cultures, as well; but, unlike wannabes,  infiltrators refuse to recognize that their belonging is born of hospitality. No, the infiltrator is pretending, is trying to pass, without having lived the belonging. The infiltrator tries to appropriate the language and the music of the language, both, without so much as a "thank you." How much of our life is now infiltrated?  These day the market seems to appropriate any and all cultural gifts to sell us back our belonging.  Rappers--just recently the outsiders raging against the machine, cleverly sampling the past and spinning it on its head--now provide the soundtrack for car commercials.   

We think in generalities, but we live in detail.

(Alfred North Whitehead)

Our belonging lives in how we roll our "r," the elongation of "ah," the how-to's of the minutiae--how to pour the tea, offer bread, unwrap the smokes.  That our belonging rests in such knowledges is dangerous if they become life/death shibboleths--for how can we ever master all the details, know the names of all the icons?  And which gesture, pronunciation, knowledge is the one to know? There are shadings and details as multiple as individuals.  We traverse through belongings, fluid and nomadic "selves" absorbed to greater and lesser degrees, into the various fabrics of daily life. Today we may pass as American, or Latina, big-city or rural resident; tomorrow's checkpoint may find us suspicious. 

The poet above knows finally, as he looks into a cold mirror, that even he is an infiltrator at some level, needing to practice, in the ultimate alienation of war, the most mundane of details so that he might pass, pass through this impossible test of belonging. As I walked  through a strange city--my head full of memories, my feet moving toward new belongings--I knew in my heart how temporary "I" am--defined and outlined by my accent and skin tone, my carriage, my clothing, my breasts, my stride.  Some day I may not speak in the right way at the right moment and then where will I belong?  Will my very life be forfeit?

Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize till you have tried to make it precise.              (Bertrand Russell)

So we do this, we aspire to pass if it gains us a life (as it does for the defeated or the oppressed, besieged or bereft, the seeker and the beginner) and we seek to root out the infiltrator (and yet, we are infiltrated most insidiously by structures and economies), even while knowing we might ourselves fail in the belonging someday.  Do we gain a better belonging in not allowing the refugee in?  Is passing such a sin?  When does passing betray our past life and peoples and when is it simply the seeking of a new life in the name of having life at all?  A password is a secret word to get us in somewhere we might otherwise be locked out from.  It overrides our surface appearance, the perceptions of the gatekeeper, confirms our belonging through an agreement of shared knowledge.  But the shibboleth, the shibboleth will catch us out once we are nearly inside. The shibboleth is the stare at our accent or dress, how we address our child, wear our hair. "So cool" coos the rural white girl serving the ice cream to my son's African American/multi-racial girlfriend. She grimaces when we get to the car, "It's just so...I don't know...Why always about my hair?" "It's really about your skin?" I venture.  "Yeah," is the quiet reply.

Like the warrior poet in the mirror, we know that the shibboleth does not serve us, does not serve our life in the long run. It points to the sweetness of belonging--the cadences of particularity but uses them to exclude, even to kill.  If we realize belonging, at best, is shifting and temporary, could we begin to recognize the refugee, the newcomer-- even those "passing"-- in ourselves?   In the long run,  I think we are all refugees, immigrants and strangers, learning to pass... and our checkpoint is on the nearing horizon. 

Pictures:

"checkpoint charlie by night" from the old Berlin Wall site, by open mindedly

"Wheat near Nemrut" Ferrel Jenkins 

The Unilever Series: Doris Salcedo

Shibboleth

Tate Modern, Terbine Hall

9 October 2007 – 6 April 2008

photo Suzy Bower (http://suzybower.wordpress.com/tag/shibboleth/

 

*Vol. 152, No. 6 (Sep., 1988), p. 342 Published by: Poetry Foundation

Article Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20601768

**I mix my term usage because "black" was the preferred term at the time I gained racial awareness. Because I was initiated into my lived racial understandings when the term "black" was the empowering label, it feels more "true" or respectful to me to use that term. However,  I agree that African-American is more accurate and appropriate (unless Haitian or Caribbean-American, of course) even while ultimately finding racial labeling problematic, however necessary at times.

***the actual meaning of the word "shibboleth" is the head of a grass that contains the multiple seeds, a head of grain.   There is some irony in this, I think, given the deep meanings of grain, of bread, and the life-sustaining pluralism of the seed head.