Shibboleths of City Siddity

The last waftings of New Orleans are drifting off my psyche leaving stranges traces: I visited somewhere entirely unfamiliar and, through that, my own past.

I was anxious about visiting-- felt I was a stranger entering a strange land, attending a huge conference in a big and culturally unfamiliar city.  The first night there I went for a walk to remember my big city ways.  I moved to my current semi-rural home from the middle, and I do mean the middle, of Indianapolis, so I once had city-wise ways.  

Each city has it's own flavor and NOLA has perhaps been both romanticized and demystified in uniquely striking ways.  That is a different topic. I had fears. Uniquely bad things can happen swiftly and sometimes invisibly in cities. When I lived in Indy, there were gangs on the hoof not far from my house and skirting clumps of young men could be a skill and a gamble. Crowded, tourist-laden streets are important to local economies that operate both on the surface and, more ominously, beneath it. And a woman alone is always aware of a special vulnerability.  Suffice it to say that there must be something intriguing there because I left with a sense of its livability, even though everything in me wanted to say "no! never!"

But was my fear somehow born from a place of privilege, an lens of outsider assumption? African American's have a word for this attitude of false superiority--siddity. One of the layers of meaning in that term, is that siddity folk come from the same place but act like they don't.  I was once a city gal, walking down borderland streets and yet here,  I was literally on the border of the French Quarter and did not venture into it until my 2nd day there. When a colleague posted pictures of his forays on Facebook,  I noted that I hadn't even visited and he offered to walk me into that world.  It was lovely.  The world of the Quarter itself (in festival mode) was, yes,  full of--as a cabbie put it later--the 3 P's (pourings, piss, puke)--all of which were disgustingly aromatic and ubiquitous, but the waft of music was masterful and the art--everywhere.  My guide and I wandered through, getting acquainted, keeping time to blues, admiring architectural tableaus.  We found an Edward Hopperian diner serving plain ol' breakfast and savored cool air, hot coffee, new friendship.

That small stroll gave me the gumption to wade through the festival and then across a quieter swath of old neighborhoods to attend a crawfish boil the next evening.  Again, as a solo woman, I set a certain pace, wove through the crowd with assurance and then strolled with a purposeful step through the quiet back streets.  My walk of two miles across the French Quarter left me with a nostalgia for the architecture of past centuries, surprising me with its ghosts--like muted lullaby strains crooned by a lost grandmother.

I re-experienced how the middle of city can have surprising corners of serenity.  It's the hidden places--the back streets, the alleys and the "empty" lots that are populated with  welcome sunlight, needed shade, shelter from the traffic of vehicle and human.  Strangely sacred spaces emerge in the midst of the most industrial of spots.  Indeed, the spare haiku of empty railroad track, the twilight warehouse stoop, the drowsy rusted scaffold-- feel like chapels in the city's storm.  And Sunday mornings can have an unworldly peace in the middle of an urban center.

When I lived in Indy, I did a backward commute--I drove over 40 miles to an outlying town in a bedroom community and, somewhat ironically, did social work there.  In the course of my work, I sometimes rode with the sheriff's department to accomplish a visit.  One time a deputy exclaimed, upon hearing where I lived, "Do you sleep with a gun under your pillow?!"  I found that comment (and the mindset it revealed) both amusing and insulting. 

Thinking we're better is usually siddity.  And me thinking that the dangers of New Orleans are any worse than the dangers of rural Western Monroe county is just plain siddity once I acclimatize.  A stranger in a strange land is always in danger.  But there are usually more friends than enemies wherever we wander...if we don't get too siddity about it.  The guy selling me pralines in the little shop took the time to commiserate about obnoxious motorcycle sounds and confided his dismay at how they overrode sublime live cello music the day before.  He even shared the name of the cellist when I revealed my love for cello sounds.  We shared a connection about things that matter--traffic, rudeness, cello music.

As my last captain's log entry pointed out, trauma happens in any neighborhood.  Indeed, my job in that pricey outlying suburb was Child Welfare and--contrary to the ridiculous occasional exclamation from the ignorant--YES, the rich and privileged do abuse and neglect their children (They just have better lawyers).  So murder and suicide happen in the lovely rural hills and they happen in crowded city neighborhoods and it's usually all about love and despair in the small world of family and friends.  Despite the hauntings of the drive-by shooting--the worst fear of a lawman anywhere is the "domestic dispute."

I lived in the middle of Indianapolis in a neighborhood bordered by a schizophrenic pathwork of gentrificition and gangs. One night the kids from next door--all six of them--showed up bundled in their winter coats to troupe up our stairs and sit in a silent row on our couch to wait out a particularly violent fight between their mom and her boyfriend. She and I had chattted now and again beacuse her lone boy-child, Jonathon, tended to play with my son. She told me of her struggle to find work, the blessing of her church people, and the wonders of imbibing aloe juice (I suspect she was hoping I'd participate in her fledgling business selling said product).

That mundane pause in our usual passing by perhaps allowed enough human trust for her to send the kids to me for safety in a bad moment. As they sat there, utterly still, politely refusing to take off their coats, I checked with the kids about whether they had been in danger (no), if they ever had been (no) and if they thought I should call the police (no). I didn't.

The police derisively referred to my neighborhood as "the swamp" and tended to treat most of us, even when victimized, as if we were swamp creatures that would be better off devouring each other. Factor in that this family was African American and I just couldn't bring myself to seek such dubious "assistance." One time all the tools, my husband's lifeblood and the source of our income, were stolen from his locked truck. The neighbors behind us said they knew who stole them but were too afraid to say. The police didn't even blink.  That's just the way it was.

So I wonder about Jonathon just as I worry about the children of the suicide couple down the road.  Jonathon is an African American male in a large city in the midwest;  his prospects are not good.  He grew up poor, but churched, loved but a little isolated, handsome, but--to the police--just another black kid running loose on the downtown sidewalks.  I don't even remember his last name or what kind of music he liked.  I do know that, when we went to the movies, he was fearless in the face of Jurrasic Park's Tyrannosaurus Rex.  My son and I had to move to the back of the theater and hide our heads in each other's arms.  Johnathon just sat there, stoic, amused, in the very first row as a monster roared out, in huge 2-D splendor.  3-D adult survival is proving difficult for my 23 year old son, how much less or more so for his old friend?  

The thin line between alienation and privacy wavers indistinct and maddening no matter our environment.  The answer is not evident to me on how to find it, cross it with timely kindness, respect it with dignity. How do I keep the siddity part of me settled down and the down home part of me open to insight and real human connection?  Are there ways for me to listen to the praline guy, to connect with Jonathon, to reach Susie when we nod in passing that will grow my soul, that will allow their souls to grow, too, in that moment of connection? 

Sanders Death Trip part II

"The sky is red, and the world is on fire, and the corn is taller than me

And the dog is tied to a wagon of rain, and the road is wet as the sea
And sometimes the music from a dance will carry across the plains
And the places that I'm dreaming of, do they dream only of me?"


Tom Waits & Kathleen Brennen Waits Whistle Down the Wind


My last post was about a neighborhood tragedy--one where, within months of each other, a mother and a father both killed themselves, leaving two young teens behind.  Like the Wisconsin Death Trip book and movie, the mundane-ness of our surroundings somehow foregrounds the small signals of tragedy. Examples of this heart-rending everyday-ness include her use of the tub to try and keep the disaster tidy and his trip to the nearby lake with his kids and a bag of Long John Silvers fish just 24 hours before those same kids found his body. Something about the domesticity of the tub, the fish 'n chips fast food at the lakeside evokes a pathos that seems unbearable. 

Despite the sensationalism of these losses, I am actually more interested in the surrounding "mundane." The mundane is the opening--the one plain book amongst the others; but when we notice it, when it is touched, the door to a secret passageway swings open, the sharp air of what was hidden in plain sight waking us up. Mundus--the Latin root for mundane--means world. 

The antonyms for mundane (per Merriam-Webster) are "heavenly, non-temportal, unearthly....."  I object. It's not the definition I object to but rather the allusions in how we use it.  When we label something "mundane" it has a whiff of debasement about it, of the rote--that which is not worth deep consideration.  Boring, actually, the mundane is boring--like doing the dishes. Indeed, it is the chore of washing dishes that is presented  in the Merriam-Webster as an illustration of "mundane."  The domestic, as ever, holds sway as the exemplar of what is trite, not allied with spirit (heavenly), entwined with time...Perhaps we are so ambivalent because it is bound to time--ticking us towards our mortality.

For if no one does those dishes, well then, suddenly the world is not quite so mundane, is it?  We get insect problems, critters, perhaps even officials called in to deem a household unfit for habitation.  The daily, mundane chores are the stitches that hold the garment of daily life together.  And the seamstress is so often female.  Take away the mundane and beneath we have crisis.  Is the mundane a mask?  Or is it something more, something holy or heavenly after all? 

I am sorry to say I did not hear about Susie's suicide until just last month, 2 months after the fact.  It created a crisis for me, to know that someone I cared about had taken her life and I didn't even know it.  She and I were nodding neighbors.  We all nod to each other as we drive up and down the street, here.  A wave is best, sometime just a lift of the finger from the steering wheel.  There's a elaborate system of manners about pulling over to let each other through: the road is so narrow that most times two cars simply cannot pass. 

Susie and I talked and plotted at one point to get rumble strips on the two lane main road that drivers--despite vicious twists and turns--seem to view as a highway.  Our children crossed that road to get to their school bus.  And our neighborhood road's juncture with this county road is a blind one--we gamble out lives everytime we pull out. So, we thought maybe folks rushing through needed to be alerted: They might round the corner to a dead stop, a line of kids crossing in front of them like some many ducks in a carnvial game. 
After our successful calls to the county, Susie and I always had a little smile for each other in addition to the nod.  But the "do not disturb" field around her was strong.  I always had a sense that her home life was not sweet.  I glimpsed the kids' father all of about 4 times in 17 years.  Susie did all the yard work, all the transporation, all of the visible child  and pet care. She hung the laundry out to dry year 'round--a raw job in our damp winters.  A gal I knew who lived next to them said he had some crazy ideas--something to do with alien abduction. What I saw from my passing-by was a woman living a suppressed life--a woman not allowed  to say much or do much.  But this is a strong "live and let live" neighborhood..  Like that laundry hung close in the vast wind, our little string of homes line up against open rural space, exaggerating our sense of frontier. So here in Sanders, the careful distance between our lives never seemed that strange.  It's bad manners to pry. Now I wish I had.

Susie's family owned the turn of the century limestone gas/grocery building at the corner of our street.  Though the building is throughly shuttered, the vintage gas pumps are still embedded out front. With the architectural lines of a rum-runner's Buick, these pumps were once artfully rusted to a soft blush of sepia.  One day, a few years ago, they were suddenly painted in bright strips of red, blue and white--some sort of effort to restore them? Perhaps a 9/11 patriotic gesture? Frankly, to me, the effect was hideous.  But such is the aesthetic of Sanders folk.  I never took a poll, but I'm betting I'd lose out in my assessment of improvement/not improvement.

Though I never saw her at it, I've alwasy been certain it was Susie's doing to paint those pumps with present-day paint.  Maybe she wanted to cheer the busstop.  I kind of think that paint represented a claim on time--she was pulling on the thread of the past, a past where her family's patriach was the prinicpal just up the streeet, a past where neighbors talked a bit more, walked a bit more, (probably fought a bit more), stopped by the store for some bread and a pack of smokes.

It's the little details that we dismiss that, in the end, break our hearts--telling the small story of lives:  A sunset echoing anguish, a crumpled fast food bag, the dog held in place by the weight of rain, the music drifting from a place we can't quite reach, ancient gas pumps translated through paint.  We dream our dreams separately. And yet, we all seem to dream.
After the paint job, I kept watching for something else to happen around those pumps, maybe the station doors to get glass on them again.  Flower pots on the steps, maybe. Despite the  impossible reuse regulations, I've always dreamed of it being renewed into a little neighborhood store--coffee for tired neighbors, candy for clamoring kids, gossip gently traded.  Now the house is empty, too. Fallen off the porch are two big pots of mums turned dark brown and lying on the ground, side by side. Something in me sobs at that simple sight and mundanely wonders who bought them and why.  Did she have one last hope of making things nice before the holidays came?  Before she climbed into that plain tub on Christmas eve, pulling the trigger on the year, on time, ending it for once and all?

For a closing, you can give a listen to the song below, closing your eyes to nod  with me one last time to Susie--leaving the husband, the children, the busstop, the laundry, the lot of us....to whistle down the wind.
Tom Waits (click to link to the song)

Sanders Death Trip

Last week I left at dusk to pick my youngest boy up at the archery club out in the western hills of our county.  It's slated to be paved over with a "pork barrel" new terrain highway--the brain child of a few deep (and gold-filled) pockets and our Ayn Rand-ian Governer.  But that's a sorrow for another story.


My journey  this early spring evening was abruptly and dramatically blocked .  The street's entry--including the gravel area around the defunct grocery--was completely cut off  by about 5 different varieties of emergency vehicles.  Misgiving and dread arose in my heart.  My plans for the night--domestic and even a bit mundane--were interrupted.

There's a perversely marvelous book (and movie that I've not yet viewed) called Wisconsin Death Trip.*   The book tells a haunting story through its gothic black & white photos of everyday settler life and portraiture. The story is one that doesn't really know an era: People suffer from their minds, times get hard and people suffer even more, someone murders someone else, babies die, debts take people down, someone commits suicide. 

I live in a place called Sanders.  It's not a got a post office to preserve its status as a community, so someday it will not be known as its own place but rather, a northern end of  the nearby (and equally tiny but possessing a post office) Smithville or a southern 'burb of Bloomington.  Yet, this place was once a stop on the limestone railway--with a full working quarry and the tiny clapboard dwellings clumped around housing the quarry's bosses and maybe some of the more prosperous workers.  At the end of my street is a genuine historical building--a sweet little grocery/gas station that still has the pumps out front.  Derelict and serving as a storage shed for the house across the way, it also served as the shelter for my kids and many others on this 1/2 mile long dead end road as they waited for the bus to pick them up to drive them nearly 10 miles south to the public school.

Just 60 yards up the road is an elegant limestone building carved with the words "Sanders Elementary School"  and just 2 miles down the road the still post-officed town of Smithville strives to preserve from near ruination the larger building that once housed Smithville Elementary.  We once educated our children within walking distance here in the "sticks."  But progress, like that soon-to-be highway, rolls along.

I often joke that the entire side of the street across from me is related to each other but it's not really hyperbole; of the 11 houses on the north side--8 of them house people somehow related to the ones next door.  I once was able to trace this genealogical "tree" but, having lived here for nearly 17 years, generational migrations have obscured the lines of relationship.  I do get misty-eyed seeing the toddlers across the way who are the babies of children I remember as kindergartners. 

But there is a certain heartache beneath the smile.  The uncle to those toddlers was put in jail by his own grandmother for stealing from her--a desperate move on her part to interrupt his involvement with drugs (methamphetamine ala Winter's Bone, is my guess). He returned from his time away tattooed with Aryan Brotherhood symbols; yet I still see the boy who played Mario Brothers on the game system with my own boy. It's wrenching....and mundane.


So last Wednesday night I exited the car, slowly walking toward the mill of Carhart-clad firefighters and men in blue with apprehension.  A young teen girl ran up to me in recognition.  I've watched this girl grow from a night-gowned toddler gazing out into the dawn as I took my morning walk. The boy I was thwarted from fetching today was then just a bulge in my belly, slowing my steps.  Tonight, she was breathless, a bit manic, "My daddy has hanged himself" she said and stood in front of me, an arm's length away.  Like a trapped bird, the ache in my chest rose to my throat and all I could do was place my hands upon her shoulders and hold her eyes, just for the briefest of moments and say "Oh I'm sorry.  I'm so so so sorry."  She leaned into me then and sobbed dryly for just a moment.  I asked if she'd found him and she said yes. The bird beat it's wings helplessly behind my eyes and she then ran off, to a new neighbor, a new shoulder.

Only 3 months earlier, her mother had climbed into family's bathtub, let the safety off the shotgun and taken herself out of this world.  The children--this girl and her slightly younger brother--were in the next room.  As a result, each day as I drive past their house (literally the gateway to our street) I think how pathetic, yet oddly kind, it was that she placed her demise in that easy to wash-down room.  And in a tub--once a luxury on this street--that tidily drained her blood into the septic stretched under the earth behind the house.

Wisconsin Death Trip shows us that the lone prairie was lone-r than we'd like to fully remember...and that hard times have always produced tragedy for the regular folk.  The mists of time seem to allow us to sentimentalize the past, rendering even tragedy somehow romantic.  Is it the clothing?  The black and whiteness of our imagery?  Or some desire we have to render tragedy then as qualitatively different from tragedy now?  The notion of progress obscures and diminishes our own present day heartbreak.  Other-ing the past, to paraphrase Santayana and Burke, may, in part, doom us to repeat it.  And in that othering we disown/disavow even our own present.

The lone hills and valleys of Sanders were too lonely, too sad for this lost couple to bear.  Rumors of drug use do not explain away the tragedy just as they do not explain away the boy across the street.  The tragedy existed in Wisconsin Death Trip when laudanum was a luxury and alcohol a debatable agent of medicine.

I can't help but remember each and every day as I pass the now-empty house, Rosie's eyes, only briefly, so very briefly meeting mine when I said "sorry, so so sorry."    You see, the girl's grandfather, the patriarch who bought the grocery when it couldn't run any more, whose house she grew up in, that man--long gone--but the heritage of this small place whose name will soon be forgotten--he was the last principal of Sanders Elementary School.
Sorry.  So. So. Sorry.

* From Wikipedia
Wisconsin Death Trip is a non-fiction book by Michael Lesy, first published in 1973. It has been adapted into a film.
The book is based on a collection of late 19th century photographs by Jackson County, Wisconsin photographer Charles Van Schaick, mostly in the city of Black River Falls, and local news reports from the same period. It emphasizes the harsh aspects of Midwestern rural life under the pressures of crime, disease, mental illness, and urbanization.
The film, which was directed by James Marsh and starred Marcus Monroe, was released in 2000. In a docudrama style, and shot entirely in black-and-white (except for contrasting sequences of modern life in the area, in color), it combined re-enactments of some of the events described in the book with a voice-over narration by Ian Holm. Its visual style was intended to carry the content of the film - as Marsh said:

A little exposition on the the title

So what is this reading of the bones I propose?

Judy Finch Fortune Telling Seal Bone

In an actual “reading the bones”—also known as “sortilege, cleromancy”--we cast “lots”—take objects and throw them, allow randomness and whimsy into a process of choosing to look, seeking a glimpse, a guidepost, a sign of the times. Most of us are more familiar with the careful layout of the Tarot cards or the "pulling" and placing of Rune stones.  The stones are probably most closing related reading the bones.  Also, perhaps the reading of tea leaves left in foretelling patterns on porcelain cup.

In reading bones, the seer takes bones (usually those of a chicken or other small animal), throws them to the ground and looks for patterns. Like any divination, there is a system, something developed over time and handed down, so the past and the insights of the past matter. Experience matters. The seeker agrees to believe, to take in the seer’s “reading” as something useful. I particularly like the image of reading the bones (though I’ve not participated in such a divination before) because bones are so visceral—all that’s left of some sentient being—the inner “solid” architecture revealed, deconstructed and then, in a charged (and temporary!) moment, reconstructed into a pattern meant to foretell, hint at, reveal what is not evident, what is hidden.

I purposely choose this imagery/metaphor to push a bit against the scientism of most academic pursuits. To traipse back to the shaman’s highly qualitative den and cast metaphoric anecdotal bones in order to “see” is definitely an exercise in belief and invites charges of superstition and illogic. Given that, I have a deep respect for science, for the exercise of inquiry, the search for sound epistemologies and ontology. I also have an abiding suspicion of any human Truth claims—including those of science--that insist that they are based on epistemologies that transcend the human generators of those claims.

By acknowledging a mystical metaphor as my guide for this writing I do not wish to eschew reference to sound science. However, my endeavor is not to contribute to the scientific investigation of learning behaviors—it is instead an effort to contribute a unique refraction through which we may scrutinize not only those sciences that guide our educational efforts but also through which we may scrutinize our reactions/actions to those sciences. Because it's my work, I can't help but offer the refraction of Early Childhood as a unique perspective on the educational endeavor. I posit that we have been gazing through this refraction unconsciously, without recognition of the lens as being a lens, and therefore accepting distortions (or corrections) as the true representation of the object of our gaze.  I suspect that "babies," the women who birth them, the folks who care for them and our consideration of this realm, live in an place of consideration where, if we are not parsing our understanding through the stetha- and micro-scope, we feel we are in the territory of reading the bones--somewhere dim, chancy, worried and wishful.

Because I could not stop for beauty

Because I could not stop for beauty
She kindly stopped for me....

I am referencing Emily Dickinson's:

Because I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me;
The carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality.

We slowly drove, he knew no haste,
And I had put away
My labor, and my leisure too,
For his civility...

The phrase keeps singing through my mind: Because I could not stop for Beauty, she kindly stopped for me. Why?  Because, the other day, like so many other days, I felt that I did not have the time for art, more specifically to take up my father's invitation to attend a stunning performance of Wendall Berry's words performed chorally and musically by talented local musicians and artists. Because I have now lived long enough to know that even an over-full day benefits from art (and also, for goodness sakes, he's my Dad), I did accept his gracious invitation.

The event was stunning. I wonder if the performers could feel us--the quietly riveted audeience. We were reluctant to clap between pieces. I think we sometimes were collectively holding our breath.  This was because we were enraptured--caught up, waiting for the next movement. Clapping felt intrusive, a bit gauche. As alto wind, drum hollows, vocal symphonics wove together, there was a leaning in the room--like sunflowers following the sun;  endings--attenuated and beautiful-- called more for a reverent bow.

But this is not a review. Instead I want to note how we sometimes don't stop for beauty.  Recently, I spent several hours composing a rather clumsy Powerpoint slide show for my students that incorporates imagery, charts and music. I wanted to engage them emotionally...with something other than text and discussion. I ache to do this. One might partially explain this by noting that I am a poet, an artist, and thus some art is my preferred language. But also, I believe and there is some evidence to support this belief that art is  key to education. (Dewey,Eisner, Sameshima, Clark, Pinar, Pink, Pillow)

This is why I keep a picture of Galinda and her bowl on my desk.  How can one apply language to Galinda's (performance art) walk--leaving the fragile mark of blood, the tracing lines of power, abuse and memory?  In some ways talking/writing about it is simply inadequate.  There are layers of knowledge, of wondering, of grief and hope and outrage, hope against hope reaching that can only be explored through witnessing and experiencing her art. I can write a treatise on it and that can be lovely.  I can write a poem and that would be lovelier. (I'am heartened to know she is a poet, too.) By this I mean, it would leave more space for the engagement with what perhaps cannot be languaged. Because art engaing with art allows for a differenct space.  Art, I propose is metaphor and metaphor gives us some space.

This direct apprehension in important.  Giving it space and responding then, in kind. Perhaps we cannot teach this apprehension/engagement nor write it, even.  But can we, as a part of human education--what my colleague Antonio Garcia terms a pedagogy of humanity--can we perhaps make it available? And then, in dialogue, in an atmosphere of collective care--what understandings might emerge?

‘Quién puede borrar las huellas?’ Who Can Remove the Traces by Regina José Galindo.

"A woman in a black dress walks barefoot through the streets of Guatemala carrying a gray basin filled with human blood. She wets her feet with it so she can leave a trail of bloody footprints behind her. Her destination is the Constitutional Court building to the National Palace. This piece is a powerful statement about the role of art in showing human-rights abuses and government atrocities. The footprints represent the hundreds of thousands of civilians murdered by the Army during the long years of war. This is a vigorous protest against the presidential candidacy of Guatemala's former dictator José Efraín Ríos Montt. During the first five days of the Venice Biennale, Guatemalan artist and poet Galindo crawled inside the cube and whipped herself 256 times - once for each woman systematically murdered in Guatemala from January 2005 until the day of the performance." from VideoArtWorld.com description
I can barely stand to write about this image.

Ms. Galindo's art, here, is gone. Gone. Gone. Gone Beyond. Gone Way Beyond.

This performance is over. This art will never fade until what it points to, ends. So it is Gone. And so this is only a capturing of a moment from her performance. I did get to view an installation of Galindo's work in a small gallery in Oxford, UK. Watching the video stilled me. In a dark empty room with a few other quiet people, I was finally and gratefully...stilled.

The performance is over but the traces to which she is drawing our attention--those traces (from government building to government building) they are upon us. For eons. They are karmic and inescapable. I admire the howl of her work. And in this case (and most of her work) she is utterly silent in the howl. The eye of the storm.

Some of her work is extraordinarily brutal: I cannot hardly bear even the still images. But she is so honest and brave that they are not sensational--they are wrenching and real and insisting that we not look away from that which we are, like it or not. If someone, somewhere is enduring what she depicts (and as an artist she depicts both metaphorically and literally)--then we are implicated. I am implicated.

I am grateful to Galindo for enabling me not only to be implicated in those scenarios but in her scenarios, as well. For in her insisting we acknowledge her, see her--she allows us in: We, too, dip our feet in the blood and walk silently through the political streets. We too, bravely endure the stares of the populace, the police, the indifferent, the offended, the hungry sympathetic, the powerful, the powerless. The powerless. They are indeed the most powerful. For it is the energy of the transferals of power that leave the trace. And the trace is upon a flesh beneath our flesh. Some might call it soul. (But, using that term vernacularally, that doesn't work for me.)

As both a scholar in the academy and a student of Buddhism (not in the academy) I am wary of terminologies. One must be precise. Precision is elusive.

So, for this post I will avoid wrestling with the notion of where the trace is left but note that I will discuss later that I am heartened by how Mari Ruti is Reinventing the Soul in such a way that I may academically reference this elusive "flesh beneath the flesh". For this post, I want to say simply "Look." Now remember.

The traces are not removed by a "who" but instead by a "how." And that is what I am interested in. Stay tuned.

http://www.videoartworld.com/beta/video_177.html
To see a clip of this work.