negative creep

So I spent the last hour of work in the Batcave listening to Napalm Death, and I'm just kind of cranky and even more skeptical than usual. My cousin's posting all sorts of C-O-NSpiracy business, people I don't know super-well are telling me I'm a misanthrope for thinking that Patton Oswalt's platitudes about the awesomeness of humanity are nice words that ring false. Yes, there's one race, the human race, but I'm always amazed we haven't destroyed the world more than we already have, I don't think we're inherently good, and a continued reading of history only bears that out for me.We might refer other people as tribal, but we all are. We'll come together in some sapitude for a day or two and go back to pointing fingers and finding scapegoats in a little bit.

Someone said today "look how far we've come" since 9/11 and if anything I feel like it's more an issue of look how far we've fallen. I don't ever remember the definition of rape being debated ten years ago, or torture justified, or the treatment of Arab Americans as second class citizens being something that was totally okay. I wonder what planet these people live on because it's not mine.

I don't know how good it is to pat ourselves on the back about how great we are because we didn't bomb a large event when we're perfectly cool with voting for politicians who are perfectly fine with reigning terror on a daily basis elsewhere. One of the things that got me in the class I took last year on 20th century Europe was how people lived side by side in relative harmony and then when things unraveled, the butchery started and suddenly everyone starts drawing lines of religion and ethnicity and then people end up dead. By all accounts the perpetrators loved their family and were fine upstanding citizens. Basically good people. If there was such a majority of good people, where were they when things got real and their neighbors were getting hauled off? 

Civilized "good people" colonize other parts of the world, advocate terrible ideologies, construct arguments that deny rights and basic humanity to others, enact policies that hurt people, stab each other in the back over trivialities when it's convenient, gossip about their neighbors, justify things like torture.  That potential for hatred and cruelty is in all of us, it just doesn't always come out in ways that are so obviously ugly in part because we're lazy and not very powerful for the most part and our sphere of influence doesn't involve control over towns or nations. So much of our evil is banal, so much of it is sins of omission and ignorance either accidental or willful and that's before anything drastic happened, doing good is inconvenient or unthought of.

Some would say that evil is too strong a word, but I'm not so sure it is.  And I wonder why anyone hangs out with me sometimes, because I feel like the queen of downers when I'm not laughing. My brain is always working overtime, I find myself deconstructing everything and questioning everything that others hold true, there is transparency and a lack of pretense that I think makes others uncomfortable. I don't even know what I'm saying anymore, I just feel like I did ten years ago, when I see things coming and no one else sees them or thinks it's a problem.

stripped to the bone...

It was such a revelation when it finally hit me that high school never ends, that the same politics take on different forms, and instead of lunch tables, we have our demarcations of neighborhoods and occupation and cultural affiliation each with its own social codes. 

So in conversation today with my mom these things come up, of friendships lost, of judgment made, of ties severed. There have been those who've considered us too fundamental, others not fundamental enough, for infractions of politics and taste and dress. It's always infinitely easier to point out other's specks than deal with your own planks, always easier to tell others how they're wrong rather than deal with your own issues, always more fun to pass the gossip around than do anything productive. 

Not everyone will like you, not everyone will care enough to get to know you, and sometimes you can be dead wrong, and there's only so much to be done and to be bothered with to that end.  To that end, how many times have I said things I shouldn't, how many times have I not wanted to bother with others for whatever reason? And it seems so absurd to cast these aspersions, because not everything is as it appears, some will only see what they want to see, others will see the worst, and who of us can truly judge? 

a case of the Mondays

I didn't want to wake up this morning, wanted to roll over again and again. A few pots of coffee later and I'm rolling my eyes and being more abrupt than usual as it seems that everyone who walked in got hit with the stupid stick a little bit extra, got especially exasperated with the males who just stood there slackjawed and couldn't seem to remember what they came in there for. Almost fell asleep in class, retreated to the Batcave to listen to sludge metal and attempt to drown out the chatter ala valley girl. Some days are better than others I guess.

let me be, just let me be

I'm sure the mood will improve tonight, upon reading of James Joyce and quaffing of grownup beverages and maybe a preliminary old lady nap. In the meantime, it'll be nice to get out of this slab and darkthrone for an hour. 

Thinking of The Children

So the photo below has been making the rounds as far as saying "oh isn't that sweet and how could anyone thing bad of him" because Kundera-esque kitsch knows no bounds on both sides, and visuals are powerful mediums. The camera only shows one angle, one dimension and any picture can be worth a thousand words of propaganda. Besides, part of Politics 101 is kissing babies and posing with kids. Who the hell are we kidding?
 

 let's take a look at the rest of the world, shall we? Here's Enver Hoxha, Der Fuhrer, Lenin, Richard Nixon, Josef Stalin, Hugo Chavez, Everybody's Not-Favorite Pope, Mr. KGB, and Robert Mugabe. Oh it's so sweet. Who would ever think that any of these people did anything that wasn't nice and didn't Care A Lot?

and of course this:

It's a dirty job but someone's gotta do it, right Chuck?...

gardens

There are seeds sprouting in boxes on my kitchen table, the conversations with the other women in my life thankfully aren't about what shoes are in this season, but about politics and pondering out concepts of life and humanity and how to make good compost and grow things. I've learned so much sitting there and taking in all this knowledge that seems to get more archaic when everything can be bought and is so convenient even if it includes gratuitous amounts of high fructose corn syrup.

There's a community garden up the street and I've been given a small strip to grow things on. The coordinator says she hopes I don't mind that everyone's a couple decades older, but I don't mind that at all. I find that people my own age who are into the hobbies of previous generations like to act as if they are the first people ever to do such thing and that gets old.

The winter was so mild that the kale and the collard greens never stopped growing, and the path is overgrown. I want to start putting seeds in the earth now because it feels like summer not two months before the last frost date, but my eternal pessimism curbs my impulses. She says they're an easygoing group of people, and I hope so. I'm looking forward to making this small patch blooming and fruitful.

My mom had a big garden at the first house they lived in, and I remember going out there to pull carrots and pluck peppers and pick the plums off the trees in the back yard. I didn't like the dirt and the getting thorns under my skin when I was younger, but then one summer, me and the girl up the street spent the summer months cutting paths through the overgrown lilacs and flower bushes in her parents' yard to make ourselves a place to play and chase the boys down the street through the bushes with supersoakers. 

When I moved to a first-floor apartment, I ended up with a plot of land in the back, the process started upon the news of a suicide and almost-murder in a sphere of my world and as the phone calls came in, I was so sad I couldn't cry and instead ended up ripping out weeds and undergrowth with my bare hands for lack of any way to otherwise mentally process.  I grew herbs, tomatoes, zinnias, beans, and hot peppers in soil that was full of glass and pulverized brick without having a clue as to what I was doing and things grew, were cooked at my dinner table, and shared with guests and neighbors. Last year I had more than I could have possibly used on an 8X8 foot plot, living on eggplant and tomato curries and basil leaves in pasta all summer, and tremendously satisfied to see labors come to fruition and shared.

The lushness of green and the innumerable variations of growing things continue to astound me. I wish I had more space sometimes or that I had more lush climes, because I love the brightness and the colors that I see in the greenhouse and in pictures of places that have to worry less about frost. Sometimes I wish I had more land for something more whimsical than vegetables and zinnias, but maybe that'll come in time, while I get inspired by other places.

 

Villa Demidoff, Florence

 Waldspirale, Germany (I would love to live in apartments like these).

 

Bridget found this picture, and being a sucker for both installations of the organic kind and abandoned houses of worship, it fills me with strange joy. More sweetness and straungeness of this kind findable at Atlas Obscura.

shape and swirl

Your remembrances are like unto ashes, your bodies to bodies of clay. 

While I'm finally getting the hang of the enamels and copper, I've slacked on the ceramics end of things, feeling uninspired and having lost the touch that led to swanky coffee mugs and swirled bowls in the past. I needed to change things up and coming out of hibernation made me want to start fresh this year on the wheel. I've watched others do it, conjuring up graceful vessels from lumps of clay, and was too intimidated at first but I know it can't be that hard, right?



A quick crash course and a small bit of instruction, and my left foot is kicking the the crank that turns the wheel, and I brace my elbows on the edge and push my fingers down into the ball of clay, constantly dipping my hands back into the water to keep the clay moist and turning, smoothing out with quick flicks of my thumbs. It's like playing the drums the way the body has to utilize so many rhythmic movements at once, something so maddeningly simple to execute in theory or in basics, something incomprehensible when it comes to pure artistry.

On my second attempt I end up with a small bowl, more like a saucer with sides really, and subsequent efforts take different degrees of time to allow me to try different shapings, different ways of caressing shape with one hand and shoring up the sides with the other, curving the contours of my fingers to make the curve,keeping my elbows rested and perpendicular. I don't care about making great works right now, but the feeling of the shape forming within my palms, the sense of the ancientness of this form and technique, the elements of earth and water to be tempered later by fire, I feel euphoric lost in this process in ways I can't explain.

love in the ruins

 “For the world is broken, sundered, busted down the middle, self ripped from self and man pasted back together as mythical monster, half angel, half beast, but no man...

In the rust belt where I dwell, the academics ramble on about 'ruin porn' and suburban crackers finding joy in derelict surroundings, something I find a bit obtuse, given that my compadres from the hood are just as into this stuff, hanging out in the abandoned Glenville mansion playing the grand piano collecting dust in a forgotten living room, cutting class to climb the stairs in the now-demolished abandoned hotel by the highway, climbing up into a church built only in the last century but feeling so much more ancient.

I think there's a universal human thing for old places that are forgotten. I was enthralled as a kid by Egyptian pyramids, Mesa Verde, and Angkor Wat. My friends whose pets I watched just got back from swimming in the ocean and hiking through the remains of Mayan temples, the Romantics painted Greek columns and memorialized broken statues of long-gone empires. Perhaps the waning days of empire have something to do with the nostalgia and fascination with gloriously crumbling structures. The landed gentry liked to build 'follies' on the outskirts of their fields for the illusion of ancientness and days gone by.

My roommate and I explored an abandoned amusement park together that's now being torn down and dismantled in delusions of development in a part of the state that seems to lend itself more to methamphetamine production and feral felines. Others had gone before us through the human-sized holes in the fence, and the concrete path throughout the park had not been overgrown yet. I didn't have a camera then, but I had a box cutter in my hoodie in case we ran across any deranged psycho killers though I'm surely too chicken to have actually used it, but considering that we were knowingly walking into the plot of a slasher film, I wasn't going to stake a good outcome on virginity alone.

 We hoped that the footprints we saw in the mud weren't too fresh, and that there wasn't anyone lurking in the old stands on the fairway or in the ballroom with the collapsing floor. The mosquitoes were dense and even though it was hot, I had a hoodie on with the hood pulled up and over as much as I could, hands in my pockets. It was the first of many trespasses, now more or less ended after the legal and societal implications of interracial friendship and private property meant some degree of hassle by The Man. Upon such hassle, I learned that most forgotten arteries of the city are technically off-limits from a legal standpoint, railroad tracks and riverfronts, all the places that me and my camera went.

Now, I've gone back to living vicariously, because there are parts of the world I will probably never see. Abandoned Russian camps, Italian villages and Khmer city states, forgotten utopias and playgrounds, catacombs and burial mounds and movie palaces succumbing to the elements, the debris of empires both collapsed and collapsing. Look on my works ye mighty and despair laughable, history as cyclical like Shiva's wheel, grinding down each generation's dreams.

ash wednesday incoherence

T.S. Eliot describes my frame of mind so well right now.

Because I cannot hope to turn again
Consequently I rejoice, having to construct something
Upon which to rejoice

And pray to God to have mercy upon us
And pray that I may forget
These matters that with myself I too much discuss
Too much explain
Because I do not hope to turn again
Let these words answer
For what is done, not to be done again
May the judgement not be too heavy upon us

This world that breaks my heart. 

Our problems stem from our acceptance of this filthy rotten system.


We are the nation the most powerful, the most armed and we are supplying arms and money to the rest of the world where we are not ourselves fighting. We are eating while there is famine in the world.

I've been reading Dorothy Day over dinner, and find it amusing that the last two presidents have quoted her, considering that everything they've done in the past decade or so would have been reprehensible to her, like predator drones and warpiggery and enriching the few at the expense of the many, though everyone quotes their respective religious figures when they see the need to, so there's really no difference.

I have long since come to believe that people never mean half of what they say, and that it is best to disregard their talk and judge only their actions.

It's been ten years since I've been to an Ash Wednesday service, I feel disingenuous taking ashes and not the bread, and so I try to comprehend, too unstilled to contemplate, too resigned to truly rage, because I doubt the righteousness of my fury, there is too much of me in it still.

"I hold more temper in one minute than you will hold in your entire life."


But it's hard for me to listen to people who say they respect the sanctity of life as created by God who have no problem degrading the humanity and personhood of others through torture, who seem too enthused or all too willing to blow up other parts of the world because of some perceived clash of values. Human life is cheap to the powers that be, who utilize human resources until they run dry, justify the unjustifiable with economics and ideology and appealing to emotions and blaming the other side while doing the same exact things that were once decried.

It is not just Vietnam, it is South Africa, it is Nigeria, the Congo, Indonesia, all of Latin America. It is not just the pictures of all the women and children who have been burnt alive in Vietnam, or the men who have been tortured, and died. It is not just the headless victims of the war in Colombia. It is not just the words of Cardinal Spellman and Archbishop Hannan. It is the fact that whether we like it or not, we are Americans. It is indeed our country, right or wrong, as the Cardinal said in another context. We are warm and fed and secure (aside from occasional muggings and murders amongst us). We are the nation the most powerful, the most armed and we are supplying arms and money to the rest of the world where we are not ourselves fighting. We are eating while there is famine in the world.

  ...We are the rich. The works of mercy are the opposite of the works of war, feeding the hungry, sheltering the homeless, nursing the sick, visiting the prisoner. But we are destroying crops, setting fire to entire villages and to the people in them. We are not performing the works of mercy but the works of war. We cannot repeat this enough.

Words are as strong and powerful as bombs, as napalm. How much the government counts on those words, pays for those words to exalt our own way of life, to build up fear of the enemy. Deliver us, Lord, from the fear of the enemy. That is one of the lines in the psalms, and we are not asking God to deliver us from enemies but from the fear of them. Love casts out fear, but we have to get over the fear in order to get close enough to love them.

Even as a lapsed Catholic whose soul still turns towards the liturgical end of things, I've never been good at this whole Lent thing, more out of absentmindedness than anything else, and having only been in the land of parochials for the first decade of life, never quite developed the guilt complex endemic to the others in my circle. I know better than to try and give up caffeine, and I eat too little meat for it to be denial, maybe a cut in consumption of goods, perhaps?

 We will print the words of Christ who is with us always, even to the end of the world. "Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who persecute and calumniate you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven, who makes His sun to rise on the good and the evil, and sends rain on the just and unjust."

I realize more and more that acquisition and use are so endemic to the lifestyle of paychecks and solo living. I have no one to provide for, and I make all efforts to share what I do have, but so much volunteering throughout my twenties has soured me on a lot of charitable work, when you realize that more goes to pay an entitled administrator than that goes to the people. The money trails of even the most altruistic causes make me not want to waste my time and resources, but instead of looking at other options, so often I just become busy with my own life and my own circle, and I don't give as much of myself and what I have as I should, even more not okay because I have no one to sustain except myself.

Love is not the starving of whole populations. Love is not the bombardment of open cities. Love is not killing, it is the laying down of one’s life for one’s friend.

So, to give more of my time, of what I possess, of my skills, of my soul? To just start, I guess, and see what happens. 

My strength returns to me with my cup of coffee and the reading of the psalms.  

How often it does. 


Shout it aloud, do not hold back.
   Raise your voice like a trumpet.
Declare to my people their rebellion
   and to the descendants of Jacob their sins.
² For day after day they seek me out;
   they seem eager to know my ways,
as if they were a nation that does what is right
   and has not forsaken the commands of its God.
They ask me for just decisions
   and seem eager for God to come near them.
³ ‘Why have we fasted,’ they say,
   ‘and you have not seen it?
Why have we humbled ourselves,
   and you have not noticed?’
   “Yet on the day of your fasting, you do as you please
   and exploit all your workers.
⁴ Your fasting ends in quarreling and strife,
   and in striking each other with wicked fists.
You cannot fast as you do today
   and expect your voice to be heard on high.
⁵ Is this the kind of fast I have chosen,
   only a day for people to humble themselves?
Is it only for bowing one’s head like a reed
   and for lying in sackcloth and ashes?
Is that what you call a fast,
   a day acceptable to the LORD?
 ⁶ “Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen:
to loose the chains of injustice
   and untie the cords of the yoke,
to set the oppressed free
   and break every yoke?
⁷ Is it not to share your food with the hungry
   and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter—
when you see the naked, to clothe them,
   and not to turn away from your own flesh and blood?
⁸ Then your light will break forth like the dawn,
   and your healing will quickly appear;
then your righteousness will go before you,
   and the glory of the LORD will be your rear guard.
⁹ Then you will call, and the LORD will answer;
   you will cry for help, and he will say: Here am I.
   “If you do away with the yoke of oppression,
   with the pointing finger and malicious talk,
¹⁰ and if you spend yourselves in behalf of the hungry
   and satisfy the needs of the oppressed,
then your light will rise in the darkness,
   and your night will become like the noonday.
¹¹ The LORD will guide you always;
   he will satisfy your needs in a sun-scorched land
   and will strengthen your frame.
You will be like a well-watered garden,
   like a spring whose waters never fail.
¹² Your people will rebuild the ancient ruins
   and will raise up the age-old foundations;
you will be called Repairer of Broken Walls,
   Restorer of Streets with Dwellings.