To yell at old ladies

“He better not - FUCK!!”

The behemoth of a dumptruck crawls from the onramp into my 75-mile-per-hour racetrack. I pull up on the wheel to push harder on the 24-year-old breaks in my el camino. The greasy trucker is too busy licking a McDonalds wrapper to notice. Chula stumbles towards the front of the bed behind me. Then the brakes give under the weight of my foot, as though a balloon I was standing on had popped. I drift towards the left, forcing the Honda to share my swerve. Foot on the floor, teeth clenched, lip curled, I express my anger in a feeble honk. The truck moves over and I move on.

The rest of the trip, the brakes are hard to reach. I think about how much this will cost me. I think about how arrogantly that trucker drove. I think about how annoying the old lady in front of me is who is stopping unnecessarily at an intersection in which she has the right of way. I think with the vocabulary of a junior-high thug.

It’s scary how quickly I can transform into a dick. A little inconvenience and I want to yell at old ladies. It makes me think about people with real problems. People whose houses are being taken from them or whose family members are suffering. Where do they get the patience to smile at grocery clerks and hold the door for a neighbor?

This weekend, my sister, who is a doctor at a Naval sub base, told me about a submariner she was treating for depression. He returned from six months undersea to lose an unfaithful wife, and after a dui, an unfaithful job. He is still paying for his wife’s apartment even as he loses his own. And he was gentle and polite to my sister. I wonder at that. It seems unnatural to me. I am not sure if he is a saint or psycho.

There is clearly a difference between my childish road-rage and this man’s suffering. I needed to gain perspective and get over it. But he needs to scream. He needs to lament.

In our culture, such displays are taboo. Violence, pain, anger; the ugly side of life is ritualized and idealized in our media - crystalized and idolized on the stage and the screen. But it is forbidden in the market or on the street. This man has nowhere to scream. Given great suffering, he is sent to a physician. This mistake reflects the sanitization of daily life. We have tried to eliminate the wild and the ugly from our experience, and so have no institutions to deal with them when they inevitably emerge. With respect to my sister, he would be better off sent to the wilderness. Or at least to an art studio. These are the last refuges of the ugly in our world.

In the media, the ugly is polished, idealized, and commodified. Death and loss are made into vengeance and sacrifice. In the hospital, they are diagnosed, classified, and studied. They are made symptoms of an illness that will be treated, medicated, and, we assume, eventually overcome. In the churches they are denied, symbolized, and transformed. The crosses and the tombs are emptied and the congregation is encouraged to be made joyful.

But in the wilderness, solitude, suffering, and death are taken seriously. And it is only in their midst that union, joy, and life attain their full meaning. The ugly stands in the midst of the beautiful, and each is actualized in the other. It is our failure to embrace the ugly that leads us to reckon a stressful car ride as an affliction. And it is this same failure that leaves us with no place to scream when we face real affliction.

Roadkill

My eyes float the treeline,
proving Nietzsche a liar.
My legs burn the incline,
lifting tubing and tires.
My lungs hum the sunlight
pumping air on the fires.

But on the hill's horizon,
a broken form dirsturbs my peace.
I pump the gears towards the mess of a rodent and hold my breath.
I swerve - awkward.
My breathing hisses through clenched teeth and my eyes clamp
down on his blood.

My only prayer is that he doen't move-
He doesn't.


My eyes float the treeline...

Train Ride

On the train from Dresden to Prague. We follow the Elbe between ridges speckled with high-peaked homes. Two sheep barely notice me pass, but I will remember their calm meditation at the base of a river-tree; maybe forever. They do not know the beauty of this place, they are it.
Roof tiles darken and plaster crumbs float away with the wind. Roots reclaim foundations as the old fisherman's cottage sighs its concession and stops waiting for his return. He has long since returned to the water and soil.
The antiquity here is startling. It forces an awareness of one's legacy. What will I leave? What will wait for my return? What will curse my having come at all? In a place where the lives of the long past are the very bones of daily life, it is harder to maintain the illusion of transience.

Meaning vs. Utility

Tuesday, April 13, 2010 at 10:36am

Her face haunted my mornings for 6 months. The sadness behind her nameless eyes pierced the books and beer cans that littered my desk. At the end of the year, I was sick of her melancholic influence. To me, she was simply an emblem of my skill. To keep her would have been vanity.

The last morning of my college years, she gazed in disappointment at the minivans and SUVs from a mound of discarded office furniture and broken televisions. Useless symbols of a life left behind.

On the seventh of Mr. Harris' thirteen trips from his daughter's dorm to his Caravan, he heard the tones of her silent lament echoing his own pain. He rushed to the heap of useless items and lifted out the bust I had made in sculpture 101. He knocked on five doors before he found me.
“Did you make this?”
“Oh.... yeah. Do you want it?”
“Why did you throw it out?”
“I don't know, I don't have any use for it... What are you going to do with it?”
“...”

He packed her carefully among his daughter's possessions; the god of meaning amidst the merely useful.

Wildflower witness

Monday, March 29, 2010 at 9:43am

Running through the woods. I leave the trail, turning left and going deeper. I highstep over fallen branches, brought low by last week's windstorm. Quick lateral movements across the face of brambles. They try to bring me down, their arm tackles break my skin, but not my momentum. My wet socks breathe in the cool mossy moisture.

And then I break through the line, but the unfiltered sunlight catches me short. Four steps to stillness. I crouch low to the ground and watch as the geese play in the canal. A bird is singing above me. My eyes catch up with my ears. She is a little robin, calling for spring. I move towards the water and sit on the slope. To my left, a tangle of thorny vines form an imperfect cage. To my right, a burst of wild flowers strut their yellow to defy the chill in the air.

I have seen such cages and such defiance before. I live between them. But there is something important about the relationship between the two in this place. I think about how much time I spend planning and strategizing and researching the cages in my world. I want theories and understanding. I want to figure out which vine to cut first. But these flowers just grow in their midst.

The Tortoise and the Hare.

Thursday, March 25, 2010 at 12:12pm

His polished road bike hummed as he passed me, a blur of spandex capped with a red shell. I crunched along on the sidewalk, gears straining to pull the rusty chain through its cycles. He breathed steadily as I strained and puffed, dragging my jeans and sweatshirt through the unusually dense wind. I swerved to the right and cut through the seminary campus, over the grass, past nodding friends.

On the other side, his polished road bike hummed as he passed me, a blur of spandex capped with a red shell. I cruised down the hill, avoiding pedestrians on the footpath, leaning back in the sun, passing him as he waited at the red light. I smile through my aviators.

Further down the hill, his polished road bike hummed as he passed me, a blur of spandex capped with a red shell. I began to enjoy this. I came to see myself as the tortoise. Not so much slow and steady, but eccentric and free. Not dressed for a race, not equipped for a competition, not stopping at red lights; just going home. I ride to get somewhere, and I enjoy it. I wonder why he rides. He can have no destination in those tights.

I passed him one last time before turning onto the canal trail, where my tires kicked mud all over my jeans. I smile as a little splashes on my face.

The Evolution of Isolation.

Throughout human history, our species has evolved a series of dependences on external items. We developed the use of weapons and became more efficient hunters with them. But without our weapons, we have become less efficient hunters than our ancestors who hunted bare-handed. We developed clothes and became more hardy with them. We developed vehicles and became more mobile. I believe that as these technologies and dependencies developed, it has become the “natural” state of humankind to be clothed, equipped, and mounted. And I know no one who laments the loss of our old efficiency at bare-handed hunting, our old hairy-backed hardiness, or our old ability to migrate on foot over great distances.

Most recently, we have developed digital technology and become more efficient communicators, researchers, and consumers. A student with wikipedia at his fingertips is more knowledgeable than any single human being living before 1985. When stripped of this tool, he may not be able to use a dictionary, or have the attention span required to read a book, but with it he can produce instantly any information he needs on almost any subject. However, in a way unlike the developments of his ancestors, we lament the loss of his old faculties. We do not want to say that it has become the “natural” state of humanity to be plugged in. Why is this?

It may be that our objections to his loss of the old capacities of learning and discipline are merely because the loss is so new, and because we ourselves have invested a lot of time and effort into developing these capacities. I am quite sure the first homo erectus whose younger brother used a flint knife criticized him for missing out on something important by not tearing flesh with his incisors. But I sense in this latest loss a danger of an entirely different type than the shortening of teeth.

Our latest tool is a machine so vast and shallow, that it cannot be grasped or kept by any one person, family, or society. It is a series of connections so open-ended that it cannot be tied to any thing solid. It requires of its users no investment of personhood; no commitment of identity or accountability. It is fueled only by marketability. It is the first tool that is larger than humanity.
Tuesday, March 23, 2010 at 8:37pm

Its creators dreamed of the connections it could forge between communities - of the communications it could facilitate between feuding peoples. And it has facilitated these things. It has opened up to its users the opportunity for reconciliation and connection. But it has not born these fruits. This vision was based upon a kind of utopian optimism which proposed that, given unlimited resources, human beings would share freely and live in peace. But this is not the case.

The internet has given people nearly unlimited intellectual and communicative resources. But it has done so without the kind of community or family-based accountability that has always regulated human nature. With a few exceptions, the internet is used to specialize, categorize, and isolate. Whatever your biases, whatever your fears, you can find them expressed with confidence on the internet. Whatever your hatred, whomever your enemy, you can find it portrayed poorly on the internet. And to do so is infinitely more gratifying to the fallen human soul than to challenge yourself and grow towards reconciliation.

Human beings work to come together not because it is in our nature to do so, but because we must. The internet has removed the must imposed upon us by our communities. We lament and fear the loss of our intellectual capacities when stripped of the internet because we have begun to see the terrible efficiency of our isolating activity when plugged in.

I am not against technology. I am aware of the irony of sharing this note on the internet. I do not even believe we can do anything to stop or regulate this trend. I just see that it is, and I lament it.