st. augustine, high school freshmen, and a storyteller by his fire.
pear-thief,
that puny boy's most shameful
secret is a naked grandmother,
and you told us all:
"i lose friends
like children lose their
teeth snatched out from under their
pillows."
esther, this is why you were crowned.
17.11.11
with a voice as big as the sea
autistic people with echo location.
minds fastening on great white
elephants.
sharks.
dear longinus,
sometimes the scenery shatters us.
stop thinking like a persian or
a prisoner or a tower or a bird and
think like a child of god.
no more wandering in the desert.
clear the dust from your eyes.
minds fastening on great white
elephants.
sharks.
dear longinus,
sometimes the scenery shatters us.
stop thinking like a persian or
a prisoner or a tower or a bird and
think like a child of god.
no more wandering in the desert.
clear the dust from your eyes.
pharaohs and faroes
like you said:
i'm afraid that the wind might
become my only home.
i don't know that i have the
strength to land.
to cling to the earth.
to keep from falling
into the sky.
could i sit here a while?
in your pews?
the wasps are building a
hive on my ceiling.
i'm afraid that the wind might
become my only home.
i don't know that i have the
strength to land.
to cling to the earth.
to keep from falling
into the sky.
could i sit here a while?
in your pews?
the wasps are building a
hive on my ceiling.
shibboleth
the israelites slew their
enemies and i lie awake at
night trying not to hurt
their feelings.
it's like when you're late,
and, dashing out the door,
your sleeve catches on the latch.
the nausea that comes from
eating after months of starving-
the flavour stabs, the inner
walls protest.
can you say shibboleth?
hollow, i can walk.
empty, i can breathe.
a dancing, somersaulting bellows,
a reed flute.
my belly is full of iron and you.
just leave me alone.
you presume.
the lord's people had human
enemies. they put them
to the sword.
enemies and i lie awake at
night trying not to hurt
their feelings.
it's like when you're late,
and, dashing out the door,
your sleeve catches on the latch.
the nausea that comes from
eating after months of starving-
the flavour stabs, the inner
walls protest.
can you say shibboleth?
hollow, i can walk.
empty, i can breathe.
a dancing, somersaulting bellows,
a reed flute.
my belly is full of iron and you.
just leave me alone.
you presume.
the lord's people had human
enemies. they put them
to the sword.
203-366-1454
cousin paulie called from connecticut
to say he may be senile,
and to ask about
the weather down south.
cousin paulie calls twice a year
or so, asking for josie or
for aunt marge. all his phone
numbers are written on scraps
of paper, hummingbirds flitting
around his desk, crawling into
his ears-
a dark warm cave, buzzing
gently with his sawdust voice.
flat sandpaper voice
with bushy eyebrows climbing
up and down its ladder.
"it's humid in the summer,
cousin paulie, but our winters
are much milder than connecticut's."
is uncle peter there?
do you have his number?
is this mrs. krumpol?
to say he may be senile,
and to ask about
the weather down south.
cousin paulie calls twice a year
or so, asking for josie or
for aunt marge. all his phone
numbers are written on scraps
of paper, hummingbirds flitting
around his desk, crawling into
his ears-
a dark warm cave, buzzing
gently with his sawdust voice.
flat sandpaper voice
with bushy eyebrows climbing
up and down its ladder.
"it's humid in the summer,
cousin paulie, but our winters
are much milder than connecticut's."
is uncle peter there?
do you have his number?
is this mrs. krumpol?
november 6th
still sunny on november 6th
cool in jeans and a light
sweater. recently, talking about
the weather has become taboo.
but i think it is a shame
to ignore
the sun
cool in jeans and a light
sweater. recently, talking about
the weather has become taboo.
but i think it is a shame
to ignore
the sun
5.11.11
george knox from 1849
pregnancy: one person
candy-coated
inside another.
there's always that moment when you can see through your hand.
a whole wall of miniature
file cabinets,
drawers shooting out from
my chest, the gun that
fires a flag, unrolling to
shout
BANG
i have a secret
will i ever even be the missing puzzle piece.
or just a one-piece puzzle.
that unsmiling daguerrotype.
candy-coated
inside another.
there's always that moment when you can see through your hand.
a whole wall of miniature
file cabinets,
drawers shooting out from
my chest, the gun that
fires a flag, unrolling to
shout
BANG
i have a secret
will i ever even be the missing puzzle piece.
or just a one-piece puzzle.
that unsmiling daguerrotype.
too school for cool
you're too much all together, all the sun's rays in one magnifying glass.
no more inferred body parts,
we're leaving these bagel shops behind.
keep my eyes open;
their lids are locked in our safe,
for sunday-wear only.
eyelids and that bonnet.
open and willing.
i want someone to prove me wrong.
no more inferred body parts,
we're leaving these bagel shops behind.
keep my eyes open;
their lids are locked in our safe,
for sunday-wear only.
eyelids and that bonnet.
open and willing.
i want someone to prove me wrong.
dream log
i dreamed last night that the boys were in the kitchen, burning the same pan over ad over again. the children, my little brothers and a tiny, brown-cheeked girl, stood in the no-man's-land between the ocean and the shore, my father and i watching as they raisined their toes.
a wave came- tall as a horse, a ceiling, the sky, tall as the atlantic is wide, but greedier than any of those- leapt up and swallowed them, dragging them, leashed, out to sea, sharp fingered. they were years younger than they are, and gone.
my father and i fell upon the waves, turning each one over, looking beneath, and feeling all the way into the corners. the little girl rose up in his arms and i tugged at the wings on her back, wrenching her about; they were a gift from the sea, not from heaven. she choked and i pushed her hair from her eyes.
my father climbed up to the beach, frantic, and the sea became a rug, soaked and dark green with black rubber shores. we ran our fingers across its surface, searching for lumps, pennies smothered beneath
smoke continued to rise from the oven, ruined pans all in a line.
a wave came- tall as a horse, a ceiling, the sky, tall as the atlantic is wide, but greedier than any of those- leapt up and swallowed them, dragging them, leashed, out to sea, sharp fingered. they were years younger than they are, and gone.
my father and i fell upon the waves, turning each one over, looking beneath, and feeling all the way into the corners. the little girl rose up in his arms and i tugged at the wings on her back, wrenching her about; they were a gift from the sea, not from heaven. she choked and i pushed her hair from her eyes.
my father climbed up to the beach, frantic, and the sea became a rug, soaked and dark green with black rubber shores. we ran our fingers across its surface, searching for lumps, pennies smothered beneath
smoke continued to rise from the oven, ruined pans all in a line.
scales and feathers
i've neglected my sketches.
dear little doe-girl, honking and gooselike, rifling through her ruffled feathers before the mirror, starting, turning, and out the door before i can even step foot inside. frozen in the door frame, nose inside and white cotton tail in the hall, watching me dry my hands, darting.
a bird, greedy for glimmer.
digging so deep wearies my shoulders and eyes, shoveling up history, a ditch into the future.
that's the reason for the small pond. you may be an uncomfortably large fish, but you don't have enough others fish to pick who you rub shoulders with.
dear little doe-girl, honking and gooselike, rifling through her ruffled feathers before the mirror, starting, turning, and out the door before i can even step foot inside. frozen in the door frame, nose inside and white cotton tail in the hall, watching me dry my hands, darting.
a bird, greedy for glimmer.
digging so deep wearies my shoulders and eyes, shoveling up history, a ditch into the future.
that's the reason for the small pond. you may be an uncomfortably large fish, but you don't have enough others fish to pick who you rub shoulders with.
morceau de concours
it's become a book of mismatched honesties, which means only that i am making a fool of myself again.
again and again.
if we had a home down here, we'd never want to leave.
this is all entirely uncrafted,
uncrafted and undrafted.
i have a sneaking suspicion they're only found in you: adventure and home.
i'm raking leaves into piles of mundanities.
should i be ashamed to knock at your generous door?
twin and opposite souls,
a town to append to my name,
i want to keep house,
pies curtains comfort
boats
the eyes of boys, i'll pluck them out myself
fresh from the vine.
everyone has come dislodged from something,
i feel as if i'll never land
don't let yourself rely on me, i may just fly away,
it takes years for me to nest in someone's heart,
centuries.
surrounded, i remain perchless.
i'm tied to the maypole's string,
round and around.
have we crossed the finish line into next year?
teach me to trudge,
i can no longer soar.
i want to see souls heavy with blossom,
like the moon,
half of their fullness shrouded in the dark,
weighty and round and ripe
for discovery,
pregnant,
the top,
the sky,
the pivot.
pirouette
again and again.
if we had a home down here, we'd never want to leave.
this is all entirely uncrafted,
uncrafted and undrafted.
i have a sneaking suspicion they're only found in you: adventure and home.
i'm raking leaves into piles of mundanities.
should i be ashamed to knock at your generous door?
twin and opposite souls,
a town to append to my name,
i want to keep house,
pies curtains comfort
boats
the eyes of boys, i'll pluck them out myself
fresh from the vine.
everyone has come dislodged from something,
i feel as if i'll never land
don't let yourself rely on me, i may just fly away,
it takes years for me to nest in someone's heart,
centuries.
surrounded, i remain perchless.
i'm tied to the maypole's string,
round and around.
have we crossed the finish line into next year?
teach me to trudge,
i can no longer soar.
i want to see souls heavy with blossom,
like the moon,
half of their fullness shrouded in the dark,
weighty and round and ripe
for discovery,
pregnant,
the top,
the sky,
the pivot.
pirouette
dear therapy... sincerely, erin
dear shan (unedited):
i left your office absolutely livid, and uncertain of the why behind my anger. all i knew was that i was furious, my fists were clenched, my teeth were gritted, and i was stalking around with mechanical marching knees. moving the way mountain rams do when they clash heads, running, leaning, falling slowly together, caught in the air, and then, like lightening, lashing out. my top half floated while the bottom was two needles stabbing holes in the ground’s fabric.
i threw off my shoes and coat and turned up the killers as loud as i could, the hot fuss album. it can never be played loud enough, and then i cried harder than i’ve ever let anyone see me cry, until the hollow spaces in my head were all cleared out. new york wasn’t a place of gusty crying, more of concealed little weeps on the subway or in corner cafes. show any weakness and the homeless men and rats devour you.
i cried hard enough that my throat sounded like it was talking to the windows and i could hardly breathe, like dogs who can only whimper deep in their insides. all i remember thinking was
i can’t keep losing. how can you ask me to unveil myself when the only people who care to look at the ones who feed off others’ nakedness, who want to stare while clothed and imagine their eyes are rearranging hurts and hairs.” the only time anyone has ever intentionally been allowed to see me in this state of tears i was the last one in the breakfast hall, the very last of a hundred, at eight o'clock, two and a half years ago.
how can i come alone and empty-handed to someone with a home and expect the scales to be even? they never will be. i’ll always be the orphan looking to sit beside the hearth with someone, but they’ll only ever have the space left at their feet or in the spare room. i’m just a puzzle piece floating along and everyone else is already in a puzzle. i’d never be anything but a tumor on the edge, and i’d rather be alone than that. i’m too hungry to be fed, i would eat anyone out of house and home and expect them to ravish my larders. no one needs to eat that much, a feast, and i would force-feed them every bite. they’re all already docked and i’m floating downstream.
we’ve all got something to orbit around and i’m just spinning in circles. i ache. it’s only been ten minutes since i could stop crying and there’s so much pressure in my head. i just found a card i wrote my mom for mother’s day when i was six, in malaysian boarding school. the front is yellow with a fabric flower on it and the inside reads, “dear mom. i love you, mom. you are the best mom. thank you for being my mom. thank you for not putting me in the orphanage.”
i left your office absolutely livid, and uncertain of the why behind my anger. all i knew was that i was furious, my fists were clenched, my teeth were gritted, and i was stalking around with mechanical marching knees. moving the way mountain rams do when they clash heads, running, leaning, falling slowly together, caught in the air, and then, like lightening, lashing out. my top half floated while the bottom was two needles stabbing holes in the ground’s fabric.
i threw off my shoes and coat and turned up the killers as loud as i could, the hot fuss album. it can never be played loud enough, and then i cried harder than i’ve ever let anyone see me cry, until the hollow spaces in my head were all cleared out. new york wasn’t a place of gusty crying, more of concealed little weeps on the subway or in corner cafes. show any weakness and the homeless men and rats devour you.
i cried hard enough that my throat sounded like it was talking to the windows and i could hardly breathe, like dogs who can only whimper deep in their insides. all i remember thinking was
i can’t keep losing. how can you ask me to unveil myself when the only people who care to look at the ones who feed off others’ nakedness, who want to stare while clothed and imagine their eyes are rearranging hurts and hairs.” the only time anyone has ever intentionally been allowed to see me in this state of tears i was the last one in the breakfast hall, the very last of a hundred, at eight o'clock, two and a half years ago.
how can i come alone and empty-handed to someone with a home and expect the scales to be even? they never will be. i’ll always be the orphan looking to sit beside the hearth with someone, but they’ll only ever have the space left at their feet or in the spare room. i’m just a puzzle piece floating along and everyone else is already in a puzzle. i’d never be anything but a tumor on the edge, and i’d rather be alone than that. i’m too hungry to be fed, i would eat anyone out of house and home and expect them to ravish my larders. no one needs to eat that much, a feast, and i would force-feed them every bite. they’re all already docked and i’m floating downstream.
we’ve all got something to orbit around and i’m just spinning in circles. i ache. it’s only been ten minutes since i could stop crying and there’s so much pressure in my head. i just found a card i wrote my mom for mother’s day when i was six, in malaysian boarding school. the front is yellow with a fabric flower on it and the inside reads, “dear mom. i love you, mom. you are the best mom. thank you for being my mom. thank you for not putting me in the orphanage.”
26.9.11
sonntag's gebet
thy kingdom come, let me be its ambassador.
give me eyes to see what breaks your heart and into which slots i'm meant to slip.
open my eyes to my purpose here; let me not only find a path but walk it well.
send me an odysseus, my grey eyes are roving, madcap minds matched.
one of him or droves of them, and remind me that they are mortal.
let me know you like lucy and her lion... be so near; forgive me my deaf ears and grasping hands.
tune my heart, tune it daily. teach me to sing your songs.
i would be a parrot for you.
don't let me be spread so thin that i disappear.
save me from myself and my vices; the more i am bored, the duller my world becomes.
i can never get near enough; i am my own stumbling stone.
give me a desire to do everything with integrity, and a respect for my duties.
even the inane, give me the joy that was once mine.
help me show people i love them, even when i can't choose them all.
and help me peel back the layers of those i choose.
guide my hands and heart.
help me be wise with my money without being fearful,
please provide when i choose what i know my heart and family's hearts need.
i am sorely tempted to forsake them for security's sake and i am sorely tempted
toward anger with them for giving me stability with one hand
and taking it away with the other.
let me find the beauty i seek, make and find.
use me for what i was made to do,
use me as who i was made to be.
i love thee. draw me close.
give me eyes to see what breaks your heart and into which slots i'm meant to slip.
open my eyes to my purpose here; let me not only find a path but walk it well.
send me an odysseus, my grey eyes are roving, madcap minds matched.
one of him or droves of them, and remind me that they are mortal.
let me know you like lucy and her lion... be so near; forgive me my deaf ears and grasping hands.
tune my heart, tune it daily. teach me to sing your songs.
i would be a parrot for you.
don't let me be spread so thin that i disappear.
save me from myself and my vices; the more i am bored, the duller my world becomes.
i can never get near enough; i am my own stumbling stone.
give me a desire to do everything with integrity, and a respect for my duties.
even the inane, give me the joy that was once mine.
help me show people i love them, even when i can't choose them all.
and help me peel back the layers of those i choose.
guide my hands and heart.
help me be wise with my money without being fearful,
please provide when i choose what i know my heart and family's hearts need.
i am sorely tempted to forsake them for security's sake and i am sorely tempted
toward anger with them for giving me stability with one hand
and taking it away with the other.
let me find the beauty i seek, make and find.
use me for what i was made to do,
use me as who i was made to be.
i love thee. draw me close.
just the weather
the mist rolls across the mountaintop, creeping up the sides and somersaulting across the peak, drifting in our window, tiptoeing down the hall and
swinging over the sill at the other end.
it's a parade,
olympian and gentle,
vaulting,
catching in my hair
like cottonwood clinging to the curtains
and lining the sidewalks.
hovering
drifting
swinging over the sill at the other end.
it's a parade,
olympian and gentle,
vaulting,
catching in my hair
like cottonwood clinging to the curtains
and lining the sidewalks.
hovering
drifting
19.9.11
ivan stoiljkovic
something in the water is making the
croatian boys magnetic.
soon lion tamers and clowns will be shuttling them
soon lion tamers and clowns will be shuttling them
into cages, all in a row, planted
like
teeth
tiny ivory spades
lined in a ruby gum,
burrowing and trapped,
pointed like the tip of the big-top,
or an indian's head.
things of the past, tan and rich red.
the croatian boys stumble about the garden,
pointed like the tip of the big-top,
or an indian's head.
things of the past, tan and rich red.
the croatian boys stumble about the garden,
clinking with cutlery like an owl
ruffling its feathers.
6.9.11
magic drawing boards
like those magic boards we had as kids, the ones with the magnet pens sweeping across the chain-link surface and all the iron shavings leaping up to form a line,
clustering,
clumping,
watch those heads turn
i'm not clever enough in the morning to flirt.
fish hungry for some sand, drowning
parched.
clustering,
clumping,
watch those heads turn
i'm not clever enough in the morning to flirt.
fish hungry for some sand, drowning
parched.
the stain-glassed greeks in the chapel
china roses on my shirt,
lilacs in my eyes,
i'm all abloom.
cosseted, and hidden from
view, dainty ladies obscured
by petticoats and eyelids,
pulled down low,
blinds in the evening.
i'm shrouded in a garden.
underneath, the roots
grow in a man.
behold, an achilles who
wishes he had the leisure
to sport breasts.
lilacs in my eyes,
i'm all abloom.
cosseted, and hidden from
view, dainty ladies obscured
by petticoats and eyelids,
pulled down low,
blinds in the evening.
i'm shrouded in a garden.
underneath, the roots
grow in a man.
behold, an achilles who
wishes he had the leisure
to sport breasts.
two weeks notice
the way birdseed takes root in a tissue, frail tendrilled roots, tiptoeing through the papers folds, grasping, calcifying and tight.
the way an oak takes root, choosing a spot and smashing through the sidewalk until cement yields and takes shape.
the way a pumpkin patch grows, sending out a long vine toward the sun, another toward the arctic, a third to the evening, a fourth pointing south, until its compass holds the earth that cradles it steady, like the people who hold each other's ankles and roll and roll and roll, a wheel going everywhere and nowhere
far from home.
pumpkins.
strawberries.
melons.
you and i
the way an oak takes root, choosing a spot and smashing through the sidewalk until cement yields and takes shape.
the way a pumpkin patch grows, sending out a long vine toward the sun, another toward the arctic, a third to the evening, a fourth pointing south, until its compass holds the earth that cradles it steady, like the people who hold each other's ankles and roll and roll and roll, a wheel going everywhere and nowhere
far from home.
pumpkins.
strawberries.
melons.
you and i
28.8.11
benny prasad
bloodborne pathogens.
and everyone in between,
harmonizing.
there was a man who had been to every country in the world and made a guitar with twenty five strings and drums for a heartbeat. he played for presidents and parliaments and underground churches and the taliban and north korean guards and the pakistanis who could have killed him on sight. he should have been dead young and his hands should never have opened, but he played and shouted to the lord, fifty countries a year. his voice was soft and high, like a young girl's and his hair fell well past his shoulders. it was as if he whistled all the time, through his throat, and as if his tongue were a spoon tapping against his tabletop mouth. why are you giving me money, he asked, i have no debts, no loans. it is the only way we know to encourage, with cash.
hanging our hammock over the cliff's edge, we wonder what we missed, which wrong plane we are roaming, and how do we climb higher to the right one. you never asked me to walk to the airport with nothing and wait for a ticket whisk me away. you said, if i commanded you, would you go?
i am no benny prasad.
and everyone in between,
harmonizing.
there was a man who had been to every country in the world and made a guitar with twenty five strings and drums for a heartbeat. he played for presidents and parliaments and underground churches and the taliban and north korean guards and the pakistanis who could have killed him on sight. he should have been dead young and his hands should never have opened, but he played and shouted to the lord, fifty countries a year. his voice was soft and high, like a young girl's and his hair fell well past his shoulders. it was as if he whistled all the time, through his throat, and as if his tongue were a spoon tapping against his tabletop mouth. why are you giving me money, he asked, i have no debts, no loans. it is the only way we know to encourage, with cash.
hanging our hammock over the cliff's edge, we wonder what we missed, which wrong plane we are roaming, and how do we climb higher to the right one. you never asked me to walk to the airport with nothing and wait for a ticket whisk me away. you said, if i commanded you, would you go?
i am no benny prasad.
when the war came
i am one half german, one quarter danish, one quarter scottish, and a little bit of an orphan.
i have no more patience to give you. i miss that shivering girl, draped in men's coats, swaddled and trailing like lazarus floating from his tomb. that girl fit in your pocket, pale and velvet like moss. a moth's wing, powdered and worn around the edges. she fit into anyone's pocket.
she could never have been a standard, she was no one's flag. she collected handkerchiefs, but she was born to be a banner. i'll make them stand tall.
all those crisp little spines.
the christmas orphan, marching, marching, flying.
goodbye, new york,
wonder city.
weinacht is mein lieblingsfeiertag.
i just can't fathom who you would have in store for me.
i have no more patience for these little words; bring out the thunder and let's celebrate. enough bark, where's your bite? try me. give me a shovel; i'll unearth some kindred spirits.
i have no more patience to give you. i miss that shivering girl, draped in men's coats, swaddled and trailing like lazarus floating from his tomb. that girl fit in your pocket, pale and velvet like moss. a moth's wing, powdered and worn around the edges. she fit into anyone's pocket.
she could never have been a standard, she was no one's flag. she collected handkerchiefs, but she was born to be a banner. i'll make them stand tall.
all those crisp little spines.
the christmas orphan, marching, marching, flying.
goodbye, new york,
wonder city.
weinacht is mein lieblingsfeiertag.
i just can't fathom who you would have in store for me.
i have no more patience for these little words; bring out the thunder and let's celebrate. enough bark, where's your bite? try me. give me a shovel; i'll unearth some kindred spirits.
5.8.11
some patchwork from lewis: a mantra
"it it not at least possible that along some one line of his multi-dimensional eternity, he sees you forever in the nursery pulling wings off a fly, forever toadying, lying, and lusting as a school boy, forever in that moment of cowardice or insolence as a subaltern? it may be that salvation consists not in the canceling of those eternal moments, but in the perfect humanity that bears the shame forever, rejoicing in the occasion which it furnished to god's compassion and glad that it should be common knowledge to the universe. perhaps in that eternal moment st. peter- he will forgive me if i am wrong- forever denies his master.
an ordinary simple christian kneels down to say his prayers. he is trying to get into touch with god. but if he is a christian, he knows what is prompting him to pray is also god: god, so to speak, inside him. but he also knows that all his real knowledge of god comes through christ, the man who was god- that christ is standing beside him, helping him to pray, praying for him. you see what is happening. god is the thing to which he is praying- the god he is trying to reach. god is also the thing inside him- the motive power. god is also the road or the bridge aong which he is being pushed to that goal. so that the whole three-fold life of the three-personal being is actually going on in that ordinary little bedroom where an ordinary man is saying his prayers. the man is being caught up into higher kinds of life- zoe or spiritual life: he is being pulled into god, by god, while still remaining himself... he is beginning, so to speak, to inject his kind of life and thought, his zoe, into you, beginning to turn the tin soldier into a live man. the part of you that does not like it is the part that is still tin... the question is not what we intended ourselves to be but what he intended us to be when he made us. he is the inventor, we are only the machine. he is the painter, we are only the picture. how should we know what he means us to be like? inside our mother's bodies, we were once rathe rlike vegetables and once like fish; it was only later that we resembled human babies. if we had been conscious, we would have been quite contented to remain as vegetables or fish. but all the time, he knew his plan for us and was determined to carry it out. something the same is now happening at a higher level... there is so much of him that millions and millions of little christs, all different, are still too few to express him fully. he made them all, all the different men that you and i were intended to be. in that sense, our real selves are all waiting for us in him. it is no good trying to be myself without him. the more i resist him to live on my own, the more i am dominated by my heredity and upbringing and surroundings and natural desires. 'myself' is the meeting place of trains of events i never started and cannot stop. when i give myself up to his personality, i begin to have a personality of my own... it is the other way around; my self-love makes me think myself nice, but thinking myself nice is not why i love myself. that is how we love our enemies. that is how he loves us. not for any nice attractive qualities we think we have, but just because we are those things called selves. he knows perfectly well that your own efforts are never going to bring you near perfection, but the goal toward which he is guiding you is absolute perfection and no power in the universe, except you yourself, can prevent him from taking you there... and yet this helper, who will be satisfied with nothing less than perfection will be delighted with the first feeble, stumbling effort you make tomorrow to do the simplest duty... we have not got to try to climb up into the spiritual life by our own effort. it has already come down into the human race in one man. one of our race has this new life: a good infection. if we get close enough to him... we shall catch it from him. those divine demands which to our ears sound like those of a despot, not a lover, marshal us where we should want to go if we knew what we wanted. he demands our worship, our obedience, our prostration. do we suppose they can do hi any good or fear? a man can no more diminish god's glory by refusing to worship him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling darkness on his cell walls, but god wants our good and our only good is to love him and to love him we must know him and if we know him, we shall fall flat on our faces. if we do not, what we are trying to love is not yet god- though it may be the nearest approximation to god which our thought and fantasy can attain... god is the one without whom nothing is strong... he wrote us, like characters in a novel."
an ordinary simple christian kneels down to say his prayers. he is trying to get into touch with god. but if he is a christian, he knows what is prompting him to pray is also god: god, so to speak, inside him. but he also knows that all his real knowledge of god comes through christ, the man who was god- that christ is standing beside him, helping him to pray, praying for him. you see what is happening. god is the thing to which he is praying- the god he is trying to reach. god is also the thing inside him- the motive power. god is also the road or the bridge aong which he is being pushed to that goal. so that the whole three-fold life of the three-personal being is actually going on in that ordinary little bedroom where an ordinary man is saying his prayers. the man is being caught up into higher kinds of life- zoe or spiritual life: he is being pulled into god, by god, while still remaining himself... he is beginning, so to speak, to inject his kind of life and thought, his zoe, into you, beginning to turn the tin soldier into a live man. the part of you that does not like it is the part that is still tin... the question is not what we intended ourselves to be but what he intended us to be when he made us. he is the inventor, we are only the machine. he is the painter, we are only the picture. how should we know what he means us to be like? inside our mother's bodies, we were once rathe rlike vegetables and once like fish; it was only later that we resembled human babies. if we had been conscious, we would have been quite contented to remain as vegetables or fish. but all the time, he knew his plan for us and was determined to carry it out. something the same is now happening at a higher level... there is so much of him that millions and millions of little christs, all different, are still too few to express him fully. he made them all, all the different men that you and i were intended to be. in that sense, our real selves are all waiting for us in him. it is no good trying to be myself without him. the more i resist him to live on my own, the more i am dominated by my heredity and upbringing and surroundings and natural desires. 'myself' is the meeting place of trains of events i never started and cannot stop. when i give myself up to his personality, i begin to have a personality of my own... it is the other way around; my self-love makes me think myself nice, but thinking myself nice is not why i love myself. that is how we love our enemies. that is how he loves us. not for any nice attractive qualities we think we have, but just because we are those things called selves. he knows perfectly well that your own efforts are never going to bring you near perfection, but the goal toward which he is guiding you is absolute perfection and no power in the universe, except you yourself, can prevent him from taking you there... and yet this helper, who will be satisfied with nothing less than perfection will be delighted with the first feeble, stumbling effort you make tomorrow to do the simplest duty... we have not got to try to climb up into the spiritual life by our own effort. it has already come down into the human race in one man. one of our race has this new life: a good infection. if we get close enough to him... we shall catch it from him. those divine demands which to our ears sound like those of a despot, not a lover, marshal us where we should want to go if we knew what we wanted. he demands our worship, our obedience, our prostration. do we suppose they can do hi any good or fear? a man can no more diminish god's glory by refusing to worship him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling darkness on his cell walls, but god wants our good and our only good is to love him and to love him we must know him and if we know him, we shall fall flat on our faces. if we do not, what we are trying to love is not yet god- though it may be the nearest approximation to god which our thought and fantasy can attain... god is the one without whom nothing is strong... he wrote us, like characters in a novel."
syracuse
when i was young, i loved paper dolls, mustard on toast, eel eyeballs, the way that library books were sorted, and cracks in the sidewalk where my bicycle skipped. you met me there, you hurricane-child who began life addicted to cocaine, lived the first few years on the street, and then became an evangelist to the people who rented motel rooms by the hour. you were ten, preaching and punching rude boys.
we grew older; you became mild as a cow and i as fanciful as an asylum, and we thought it would all end there, deep in the black forest, but we survived and together became bright, true swords, lithe and poised. and now i find myself telling you goodbye? again?
i stood sobbing before the baggage man, apologizing over and over for the weight of my luggage.
an interlude before the someones
the first, we are symmetry itself, symmetry that gives way to puzzle pieces. our train tracks are lined up and i am never so lovely as when i am with him. together, i breathe easy and true, wry-mouthed, tunnel-eyed, candle-shined, and my hair all tangled into one feisty, lilac breeze. we are absolutely free with one another, entirely free. together, we could climb an everest or invent our own unscalable mountain. we could survive anything, a fatal joy even. we turn like the two hands of a clock, anchored and twirling. i've never wept like i did when he drove away. we terrify each other and we would learn any language to be together. it's eternal.
i do not desire him.
the second was the first, and i dream of him two nights out of three though it has been years. he reads my thoughts through my eyes when they need to crawl out and when they ought to remain a mystery, he wonders at them fluttering inside my skull, like moths in a bulb jar. together, we would live on a boat or build out own cottage on an abandoned city corner. he writes in the language of my heart and our voices are evenly matched. he rouses my fury, my desire, my prose and my poetry, my silence, my peace, my ponderings, my ever-awed curiosity, my loyalties. i was in love with him and he was even more in love with me. he is a column that has torn itself free; he has half-gown, half-built himself wings. he was my sky-lighted pantheon.
his train tracks are aimed, they run to the edge of his own cliff, and no engine, however given to flight, could survive such a fall. it is a height, himself.
therefore, this is how i will have it. i will stand on my own sunny street corner in the square, watching the crowds scurry and roar, until i find a someone. i will say to him, "do you love someone? or are you in love?" and if he says no, i ill ask, "will you please kiss me?"
be gentle; no one has ever done this to me. i never let them.
he might oblige. i will say thank you, show him my favourite smile, take his photograph, and recede. maybe his friends will cheer , or take his place, or maybe he will be wide-eyed and alone. and i would be gone.
i have my moments away from the mulberry bush, and there are times when i'm walking 'round it, 'round and 'round. but mostly, i am dreaming somewhere deep in its thicket.
i do not desire him.
the second was the first, and i dream of him two nights out of three though it has been years. he reads my thoughts through my eyes when they need to crawl out and when they ought to remain a mystery, he wonders at them fluttering inside my skull, like moths in a bulb jar. together, we would live on a boat or build out own cottage on an abandoned city corner. he writes in the language of my heart and our voices are evenly matched. he rouses my fury, my desire, my prose and my poetry, my silence, my peace, my ponderings, my ever-awed curiosity, my loyalties. i was in love with him and he was even more in love with me. he is a column that has torn itself free; he has half-gown, half-built himself wings. he was my sky-lighted pantheon.
his train tracks are aimed, they run to the edge of his own cliff, and no engine, however given to flight, could survive such a fall. it is a height, himself.
therefore, this is how i will have it. i will stand on my own sunny street corner in the square, watching the crowds scurry and roar, until i find a someone. i will say to him, "do you love someone? or are you in love?" and if he says no, i ill ask, "will you please kiss me?"
be gentle; no one has ever done this to me. i never let them.
he might oblige. i will say thank you, show him my favourite smile, take his photograph, and recede. maybe his friends will cheer , or take his place, or maybe he will be wide-eyed and alone. and i would be gone.
i have my moments away from the mulberry bush, and there are times when i'm walking 'round it, 'round and 'round. but mostly, i am dreaming somewhere deep in its thicket.
winnowing and straw
my sunhat is crouched on the floor, iglooed around air, sheltering no wendybird, just coating nothing, tented to keep its own shape, ginger, tender, expectant.
it snatches freckles as they fall, like any mother would.
my father was a yardstick. any father is a yardstick.
at the end of time, when god is fully revealed, he will peer into each of our eyes and discern either love or hate.
it snatches freckles as they fall, like any mother would.
my father was a yardstick. any father is a yardstick.
at the end of time, when god is fully revealed, he will peer into each of our eyes and discern either love or hate.
the old man's question: on a fishing boat
when we are one,
will you love
my loves
and hate my hates?
you have been my mortar
and you have been
my pestle.
i am moving through the days like a child pushes back his curtains, draws them open in the morning.
i am moving from minute to minute like a dusty red elephant siphoning dark green water out of a river.
i'm slipping between seconds like a ferris wheel suspended in the sky, suspended, swaying, poised, ticking.
i am sliding from week to week like a man holding negatives high, peering through them to the sun's face.
mechanical and aquatic.
sliding along the curtain rod,
white linen and a faded circus tent.
i watch and wonder:
am i in love?
why am i not in love?
if only we could muster up some desire.
will you love
my loves
and hate my hates?
you have been my mortar
and you have been
my pestle.
i am moving through the days like a child pushes back his curtains, draws them open in the morning.
i am moving from minute to minute like a dusty red elephant siphoning dark green water out of a river.
i'm slipping between seconds like a ferris wheel suspended in the sky, suspended, swaying, poised, ticking.
i am sliding from week to week like a man holding negatives high, peering through them to the sun's face.
mechanical and aquatic.
sliding along the curtain rod,
white linen and a faded circus tent.
i watch and wonder:
am i in love?
why am i not in love?
if only we could muster up some desire.
1.8.11
bed stuy, do or die
the boys on the corner wear their pants pulled low. they do chin-ups on the street signs and sport knit hats or yankee caps, even in the summer, even in the winter. one of them is named gregory, and they are always there, morning and night, to call or whisper things like, "hey, gorgeous. hey there, snow white. girl, you got the most beautiful eyes i ever seen." in the deli's doorstep, they bicker, joke, sweat, whistle, kick cats, snap open bottles of soda pop. they move like the jellyfish swim, growing slack and then clenching and moving nowhere though they always seem to be churning saltwater, churning and drifting. they're electric even in the ocean, sparking and charged on the crammed avenue.
monday, august 1st. 2:37 AM, she wrote from my window:
"One of the corner boys got shot. not 20 mins ago. Driveby. These are dog days, its like theres crazy in the streets. I watched the car drive away and in my madness saviour complex i almost ran down to give them towels before the subletter stopped me. I had this feeling something might happen"
monday, august 1st. 2:37 AM, she wrote from my window:
"One of the corner boys got shot. not 20 mins ago. Driveby. These are dog days, its like theres crazy in the streets. I watched the car drive away and in my madness saviour complex i almost ran down to give them towels before the subletter stopped me. I had this feeling something might happen"
12.7.11
11.7.11
may 21st
a homeless proselyte;
his yellow teeth ringed like an old
oak betraying its age,
confessing long winters
of hunger and paper-thin coats.
he proclaims holiness,
the kind that reproduces,
dandelions in the garden,
covering the continent in their cotton
helicopters.
the couple at the table
look at the ground and reply
that holiness lives between our shoulders.
no, he says, it falls
down from the sky.
the world ends last month,
haven't you heard?
his yellow teeth ringed like an old
oak betraying its age,
confessing long winters
of hunger and paper-thin coats.
he proclaims holiness,
the kind that reproduces,
dandelions in the garden,
covering the continent in their cotton
helicopters.
the couple at the table
look at the ground and reply
that holiness lives between our shoulders.
no, he says, it falls
down from the sky.
the world ends last month,
haven't you heard?
mind the gap
the winter eats my spirit. in january and february i am no more than a walnut shell missing its tumor of a brain, than lake michigan when the ice coats the edges, crispy and slick so no one can hear the slopping, rippling center, like old alarm clocks that refuse to surrender their tickings, but ring at all the wrong hours, like fish stuck staring sideways and snapping their necks just trying to look ahead. i am stamps too dry to be licked.
i am a barnacle shivering against the hull of an alaskan crabbing boat, bleary eyed and iron. i am soccer's slow dive that no one stands up after. there is no after. the little girl who stays inside for fear of geese and lumps. the poppy that drops its petals the moment it is plucked. the writing on the ear canal wall, the cabinet with the lost key. a growing stalagmite, trapped in a saran-wrap uterus.
but only until april.
things are growing. we all donated a piece, then came the zygote. cells are tearing themselves to shreds, and their death is making this new thing. they invade relentlessly,
fetus.
fetus of spring, i look through your translucent skin to a lavender mind. it ticks with the seconds. you dream of the opera, when mimi dies and it is may's birthday. the day when westerns are written and sisters visit and the ducks come home.
i am a barnacle shivering against the hull of an alaskan crabbing boat, bleary eyed and iron. i am soccer's slow dive that no one stands up after. there is no after. the little girl who stays inside for fear of geese and lumps. the poppy that drops its petals the moment it is plucked. the writing on the ear canal wall, the cabinet with the lost key. a growing stalagmite, trapped in a saran-wrap uterus.
but only until april.
things are growing. we all donated a piece, then came the zygote. cells are tearing themselves to shreds, and their death is making this new thing. they invade relentlessly,
fetus.
fetus of spring, i look through your translucent skin to a lavender mind. it ticks with the seconds. you dream of the opera, when mimi dies and it is may's birthday. the day when westerns are written and sisters visit and the ducks come home.
jimmy
i will be a prophet.
a PROPHET.
visions.
trances.
cherubim.
like
those men in italy who
steer boats with sticks,
and the tourists who
float. glass beads.
sometimes, i look at my wife and say, 'darling, speak to me of love!' she stammers, as though she were surprised.
a prophet.
like bakers who breathe and and spices with their eyes closed, like the deaf who feel cellos in their chests and sway, like knife throwers. i dreamed last night, sitting in the german pews, that my skull was full of tiny machines. they look like the type that spear needles through fabric, but they were x-ray machines. they pricked the backs of my eyes and i stared straight ahead, holding very still. they were fragile, like a fox embryo's spine pressed up inside my eyebrows. images whirred, film clicks; they can see through my bones to the scrapings and velvet breeze left behind. they can see through my bones, they can see themselves:
a tiny, curled, fern-of-a-fox.
a miniature seashell fossil fox.
a paper-curl fox.
a skeleton fox, its bones painted gold.
a skeleton in a skull drained dry,
the x-rays reading bones beneath bones.
a PROPHET.
visions.
trances.
cherubim.
like
those men in italy who
steer boats with sticks,
and the tourists who
float. glass beads.
sometimes, i look at my wife and say, 'darling, speak to me of love!' she stammers, as though she were surprised.
a prophet.
like bakers who breathe and and spices with their eyes closed, like the deaf who feel cellos in their chests and sway, like knife throwers. i dreamed last night, sitting in the german pews, that my skull was full of tiny machines. they look like the type that spear needles through fabric, but they were x-ray machines. they pricked the backs of my eyes and i stared straight ahead, holding very still. they were fragile, like a fox embryo's spine pressed up inside my eyebrows. images whirred, film clicks; they can see through my bones to the scrapings and velvet breeze left behind. they can see through my bones, they can see themselves:
a tiny, curled, fern-of-a-fox.
a miniature seashell fossil fox.
a paper-curl fox.
a skeleton fox, its bones painted gold.
a skeleton in a skull drained dry,
the x-rays reading bones beneath bones.
the titanic
loose lips sink ships,
so do holes,
and bombs.
and poorly contrived rhymes.
and occasionally, icebergs.
how did the iceberg feel? the people screaming and burning and drowning, but a steely stern rammed that iceberg in the night, boat-rape.
a sleeping iceberg, crushed. soft pink people, like baby mice or a yawning clam or pomegranate seeds, plummeting into the sea, reeled into rubber boats, survivors casting and pulling them up out of the water like glistening, chocking fish an a line, like my father's preaching shoes, lifted out of the pile by the laces, by the gypsies.
hanging on a string, a hook, a preserver, stolen from death. stolen from heaven, stolen from hell.
the gypsies stole me from my cradle. they stole my father's shoes, the bits of the boat, my friend's grandmother's taxi cab, and me.
from whom did they steal us? the devil? the sea? macedonia?
loose lips sink ships.
rolling stones gather no moss.
naked, twirling stones.
i threw a stone at a little boy once, just to scare him, but it bounced up from the ground and hit his knee. his mom shrieked at me and all the other kids noticed my knees, knobbly, purple, covered in bumps. why are your knees like that, they asked. i gathered no moss. we moved to the aftermath of a genocide.
so do holes,
and bombs.
and poorly contrived rhymes.
and occasionally, icebergs.
how did the iceberg feel? the people screaming and burning and drowning, but a steely stern rammed that iceberg in the night, boat-rape.
a sleeping iceberg, crushed. soft pink people, like baby mice or a yawning clam or pomegranate seeds, plummeting into the sea, reeled into rubber boats, survivors casting and pulling them up out of the water like glistening, chocking fish an a line, like my father's preaching shoes, lifted out of the pile by the laces, by the gypsies.
hanging on a string, a hook, a preserver, stolen from death. stolen from heaven, stolen from hell.
the gypsies stole me from my cradle. they stole my father's shoes, the bits of the boat, my friend's grandmother's taxi cab, and me.
from whom did they steal us? the devil? the sea? macedonia?
loose lips sink ships.
rolling stones gather no moss.
naked, twirling stones.
i threw a stone at a little boy once, just to scare him, but it bounced up from the ground and hit his knee. his mom shrieked at me and all the other kids noticed my knees, knobbly, purple, covered in bumps. why are your knees like that, they asked. i gathered no moss. we moved to the aftermath of a genocide.
last winter
for the first thirty years,
jesus was a carpenter and a brother.
i am in pursuit of pies.
pies are my prize.
pies, the hand of one who slowly dies,
and being the invisible one who dries
your dripping dishes.
i put down my shovel;
i am an assassin;
i kill and eat lists.
my teeth are tiny x's.
allotted a year of alone, i chew and swallow.
jesus was a carpenter and a brother.
i am in pursuit of pies.
pies are my prize.
pies, the hand of one who slowly dies,
and being the invisible one who dries
your dripping dishes.
i put down my shovel;
i am an assassin;
i kill and eat lists.
my teeth are tiny x's.
allotted a year of alone, i chew and swallow.
2010
the fireworks boom beyond my shutters.
i'm in the list business;
i'm an assassin,
skewering boxes with x's
and checks, the words to
their right drifting away,
disembodied.
we are all dying, starting with the moment of our birth. i could hold anyone's hand and earn another x.
my demons are a donkey's bray, shelves of books i've read and reread, and beelzebub.
someone tore out the walls of the creek with a crane and locked the doors of the village church. but the art factory's assembly lines continue to roll, cranking out crates of fired clay and peacocks dressed in buttons and glass.
if i wore a mirror around my neck, would you see that you dwell in my heart?
goodbye, 2010, you labyrinth. long live the compass that truly points north.
[i have rubbed shoulders with a thousand naked germans]
who suckled loneliness? who pitied the poor naked wailing thing and built it a cradle, knowing or not knowing its birth-name? my breasts keep the creature alive, my breasts, the atlantic, and income tax.
the true question is, who birthed it? god, far away? the serpent in the backyard? the woman in my chest? the first dutch mayor of new york and whoever else built these streets so long.
it's the little boys who are the worst, their chests like wooden spoons or raven wings, all knobbly and brittle, hiding their eyes while you promise to come back for summer and pretend to hunt for your suddenly elusive passport.
when the new year first cried, we were with the sugar plum fairy. she was new with a plumed tail and no candy. i am still my demons' wetnurse.
this plane is landing, again and again.
i'm in the list business;
i'm an assassin,
skewering boxes with x's
and checks, the words to
their right drifting away,
disembodied.
we are all dying, starting with the moment of our birth. i could hold anyone's hand and earn another x.
my demons are a donkey's bray, shelves of books i've read and reread, and beelzebub.
someone tore out the walls of the creek with a crane and locked the doors of the village church. but the art factory's assembly lines continue to roll, cranking out crates of fired clay and peacocks dressed in buttons and glass.
if i wore a mirror around my neck, would you see that you dwell in my heart?
goodbye, 2010, you labyrinth. long live the compass that truly points north.
[i have rubbed shoulders with a thousand naked germans]
who suckled loneliness? who pitied the poor naked wailing thing and built it a cradle, knowing or not knowing its birth-name? my breasts keep the creature alive, my breasts, the atlantic, and income tax.
the true question is, who birthed it? god, far away? the serpent in the backyard? the woman in my chest? the first dutch mayor of new york and whoever else built these streets so long.
it's the little boys who are the worst, their chests like wooden spoons or raven wings, all knobbly and brittle, hiding their eyes while you promise to come back for summer and pretend to hunt for your suddenly elusive passport.
when the new year first cried, we were with the sugar plum fairy. she was new with a plumed tail and no candy. i am still my demons' wetnurse.
this plane is landing, again and again.
bible camp
no tripe.
they've wheeling the ark over here now, indigo waves stenciled along the side.
the getaway car.
we're gonna blow this joint, baby.
i'd rather be called sweetheart than any other name, or let you invent a new one every day.
it takes moxie to stalk, lure, and trap a double, but if you have to hunt them down, they've probably not your doppel anyhow.
if everyone else drowns, i want someone else with me in this boat.
they've wheeling the ark over here now, indigo waves stenciled along the side.
the getaway car.
we're gonna blow this joint, baby.
i'd rather be called sweetheart than any other name, or let you invent a new one every day.
it takes moxie to stalk, lure, and trap a double, but if you have to hunt them down, they've probably not your doppel anyhow.
if everyone else drowns, i want someone else with me in this boat.
my childhood
it doesn't matter that my bed was beneath windows frosted inside with ice, or that i slept on the floor for a year, or that we heated our house with a woodstove, or that i woke up every morning to the call to prayer, or that my bunk bed was labelled with my name on an index card or that i spent years in a guest room. the point is that i slept, whether or not i had a bed, whether or not my bed was in the same town as my family, and regardless of which country i lay down in. the moral of the story is that i slept. i slept, ate, read, bathed occasionally. i was a child.
it's so much simpler than we ever imagined.
it's so much simpler than we ever imagined.
honeycomb
i want to be your bee keeper,
a hive of secrets,
smooth unspoken honey-slicks.
i am one of snow white's dwarves,
whistling with my pick ax,
mining up quarrels.
scattered between rubies and jade,
i'm chopping out lumps of sass,
refining bickerments.
i have one of those overt names.
the white cloud-plateaus ahead look so much like icebergs ripping out of this skate-stark cotton lake, i am half afraid to crash through them and feel nothing but wet. they look like whales, bellowing and rearing, frozen and soft-frosted.
i want brilliance,
i aspire to be brilliant.
i catch little glimpses of it scurrying across other brows, skipping across them like tightrope walkers frightened of falling.
i don't want to imagine tangles to solve, i want to find tangles already unsnarling themselves and record what i see. i'm no bloodhound, just an immobile eye.
the whales are one crocodile, a kindred spirit, newborn. newborn. when was the last time anything was born in this town? we've all been elderly, growing, growing, grone.
you there!
i'm warning you, i've got my pick ax and six ugly midgets!
i demand to be right.
all hail the brain queen,
inerrant erin.
small wonder with squabble the nights away.
i'd cut out my tongue to love more purely. i don't want to drag my treasures all over the city on a bus. my nails are purple with cold, and this the fourth day of summer. i'll never be called snow white again. adios, hassle-men. i'm going to live with king arthur in the valleys that didn't go with the wind. why does he always have so many dance partners anyhow? it's not as if he keeps time.
a hive of secrets,
smooth unspoken honey-slicks.
i am one of snow white's dwarves,
whistling with my pick ax,
mining up quarrels.
scattered between rubies and jade,
i'm chopping out lumps of sass,
refining bickerments.
i have one of those overt names.
the white cloud-plateaus ahead look so much like icebergs ripping out of this skate-stark cotton lake, i am half afraid to crash through them and feel nothing but wet. they look like whales, bellowing and rearing, frozen and soft-frosted.
i want brilliance,
i aspire to be brilliant.
i catch little glimpses of it scurrying across other brows, skipping across them like tightrope walkers frightened of falling.
i don't want to imagine tangles to solve, i want to find tangles already unsnarling themselves and record what i see. i'm no bloodhound, just an immobile eye.
the whales are one crocodile, a kindred spirit, newborn. newborn. when was the last time anything was born in this town? we've all been elderly, growing, growing, grone.
you there!
i'm warning you, i've got my pick ax and six ugly midgets!
i demand to be right.
all hail the brain queen,
inerrant erin.
small wonder with squabble the nights away.
i'd cut out my tongue to love more purely. i don't want to drag my treasures all over the city on a bus. my nails are purple with cold, and this the fourth day of summer. i'll never be called snow white again. adios, hassle-men. i'm going to live with king arthur in the valleys that didn't go with the wind. why does he always have so many dance partners anyhow? it's not as if he keeps time.
hustle-bustle
bustling. i want it bustling, but never shoving.
don't touch my back. don't you dare.
i will never conceal, but never proffer.
it's a public mine, mine, my public mine,
germs and gravel mingletwined,
fenced and gloved in patience.
i'll plant my own eden in a tobacco tin and carry it around.
where do you keep your eden? adam's slunk up behind the clouds on eve's leash.
don't touch my back. don't you dare.
i will never conceal, but never proffer.
it's a public mine, mine, my public mine,
germs and gravel mingletwined,
fenced and gloved in patience.
i'll plant my own eden in a tobacco tin and carry it around.
where do you keep your eden? adam's slunk up behind the clouds on eve's leash.
a layover, then georgia glory
the smacking of your lips and slurping of your sandwich are sending spasms through my neck. i can feel your horrid laughter vibrating through the pages of my magazine. you stink like burnt toast.
i hate everybody.
especially fat bodies.
and adolescents.
although i don't particularly mind fat adolescents.
........................................................
the plane lands on its heels, hesitant. it glides along with its toes in the air before flopping forward with an ungainly thump. passengers pour out of its orifices and rush to the restrooms, closeted as close as the plane seats, but with dwarf walls between each throne. lady farts are humming in every corner, like the brief throb of blowing across a glass bottle.
in the south, there are thousands of closets. the only things not hidden away are antiques or edibles.
i hate everybody.
especially fat bodies.
and adolescents.
although i don't particularly mind fat adolescents.
........................................................
the plane lands on its heels, hesitant. it glides along with its toes in the air before flopping forward with an ungainly thump. passengers pour out of its orifices and rush to the restrooms, closeted as close as the plane seats, but with dwarf walls between each throne. lady farts are humming in every corner, like the brief throb of blowing across a glass bottle.
in the south, there are thousands of closets. the only things not hidden away are antiques or edibles.
tolkien's forest
it's useless to dredge up the past this way; who, after drinking a mug of tea, would chew the bitter dregs? let us merely remember.
it's the iron curtain all over again, unseen and unheard behind miles of razor-wire, but for the sky's unblinking eye. it's miles of saplings behind the miles of wire, too flighty to take root and too frightened to stand still lest they grow into the ground. they're dancing trees, some waltz in pairs, some boogying with ivy ensnared, some flicking and tripping. they're leaf-heavy and toppling, preening, prancing, tumbling.
the wire is to keep the wise old gardener out, with his startling laugh and fierce hands, but little do they know- the sky is his spy.
with each amber heartbeat, he draws nearer, spade and shears in hand. there is more joy in peaches, call the tallest trees over the wretched curtain, than in crawling across hills and valleys.
choose a peak and blossom.
it's the iron curtain all over again, unseen and unheard behind miles of razor-wire, but for the sky's unblinking eye. it's miles of saplings behind the miles of wire, too flighty to take root and too frightened to stand still lest they grow into the ground. they're dancing trees, some waltz in pairs, some boogying with ivy ensnared, some flicking and tripping. they're leaf-heavy and toppling, preening, prancing, tumbling.
the wire is to keep the wise old gardener out, with his startling laugh and fierce hands, but little do they know- the sky is his spy.
with each amber heartbeat, he draws nearer, spade and shears in hand. there is more joy in peaches, call the tallest trees over the wretched curtain, than in crawling across hills and valleys.
choose a peak and blossom.
the mafia
the mafia lives in a bakery. the bakery is near the zoo. flash a card, step right through the door, but if not, kiss your buttered cakes goodbye. we'll take your money, your drugs, your wife, your rugs, beat them out, coat you in dust, and we'll eat your pastries up.
no ivy; buildings, fountains, angry trees as straight as they are slim. dead hearts, all bound up in ivy like slabs of pork bent into a tight clover by greasy twine, dangling on the handlebars of a chinese boy's bicycle.
i dream of dragons and those times when the compass no longer points north. i want to live in deadly earnest, by the skin of my teeth. break a hole in my hull; send me a monster in a crates; post an engine running wild off its tracks; i need to kill something big.
skewer it and spit its heart. i am a conqueror. give me an army and i'll storm anything you like so long as i can't hear its heart beating.
i grow more and more flippant each day, shouting goodbyes out train windows and feigning hunger as an excuse to cook. i'm digging up reasons, taking my trowel to the garden and unearthing the lies i planted not so long ago. i'll say anything if you'll let me fritter. i'll give you all my teeth if you'll leave me here; i'd trade my soul for something trivial.
i've made a crown of upended telescopes, everything must be three sizes smaller or i will burst. i'm that asthmatic balloon that's been loving too hard and crying too long. so i'm saying, that's not a dam near bursting, just a teacup filled too high.
i'm just so damn angry, anne, that the fat times are fading.
no ivy; buildings, fountains, angry trees as straight as they are slim. dead hearts, all bound up in ivy like slabs of pork bent into a tight clover by greasy twine, dangling on the handlebars of a chinese boy's bicycle.
i dream of dragons and those times when the compass no longer points north. i want to live in deadly earnest, by the skin of my teeth. break a hole in my hull; send me a monster in a crates; post an engine running wild off its tracks; i need to kill something big.
skewer it and spit its heart. i am a conqueror. give me an army and i'll storm anything you like so long as i can't hear its heart beating.
i grow more and more flippant each day, shouting goodbyes out train windows and feigning hunger as an excuse to cook. i'm digging up reasons, taking my trowel to the garden and unearthing the lies i planted not so long ago. i'll say anything if you'll let me fritter. i'll give you all my teeth if you'll leave me here; i'd trade my soul for something trivial.
i've made a crown of upended telescopes, everything must be three sizes smaller or i will burst. i'm that asthmatic balloon that's been loving too hard and crying too long. so i'm saying, that's not a dam near bursting, just a teacup filled too high.
i'm just so damn angry, anne, that the fat times are fading.
long distance
it's cruel to let yourself be kidnapped and leave us always wondering
where the body went.
where the body fell,
mouldered,
withered.
you terrify me, walking around town with your skin grey and shriveled,
your eyes long since stolen
by some raven spoon.
when the wind blows, garden dirt
builds up along my windowsill. i'm
snowed in by carrot beds.
it's all the same; you're dead to me.
(just way the word and i'll tear down your tombstone)
if you're my sister,
why can't we take the same maiden name?
i'm wearing a revolving door, four arms to my starfish's five,
but that's the price of growing up-
cold, sheer glass and this endless spinning.
spinning and spinning,
but never will you fall.
i'm eating wind and shoes.
where the body went.
where the body fell,
mouldered,
withered.
you terrify me, walking around town with your skin grey and shriveled,
your eyes long since stolen
by some raven spoon.
when the wind blows, garden dirt
builds up along my windowsill. i'm
snowed in by carrot beds.
it's all the same; you're dead to me.
(just way the word and i'll tear down your tombstone)
if you're my sister,
why can't we take the same maiden name?
i'm wearing a revolving door, four arms to my starfish's five,
but that's the price of growing up-
cold, sheer glass and this endless spinning.
spinning and spinning,
but never will you fall.
i'm eating wind and shoes.
im mai
i want to be with sinners, not the petty, complacent kind, but the kind that live desperately. people who have terrible secrets and will fight you tooth and nail if you try to dig them up. i want the people who will knock you down if you're doing something crazy. i want someone to punch me. i want to know the people who have a reason to feel guilty. the people who are crushed, and when they are heartbroken, hate as fully as they loved. i want people who rage and aren't afraid to show a little skin. i want a table that is crowded and i don't want people to be offended by little peeves. i want everything to be bigger than it is. i'd rather have war than peace if peace is myopic, narcoleptic, and plastic-wrapped. strike that, narcolepsy is shocking. substitute drowsy. i want to run away, and whether it's to a civil war, a farm, or back to my mother, i don't care. i just want to run. i want subways crashing and people brandishing knives. i want justice to be so exacting as to be cruel, and i want to break my own rules in the name of mercy. i want it all to be harsh so i can teach it to be gentle. i want things to needing taming. i have too little faith to ever imagine i could upset some beast already slumbering.
steinbeck wrote about one little boy who lay on his stomach for hours watching an anthill and another who ruined it to see the ants scatter, frantic. i can never seem to reconcile them in me. one is always punching, flailing, and the other won't even fight back. they'll die of old age and i'll live on, an epileptic marionette until i end up stroking, paralyzed on one side and convulsing on the other. how can i split so precisely, a pared apple? pared in pairs, possessed by a pair, one arm is swinging like a helicopter. my favourite thing is kitchens and living rooms joined by one long wooden table.
i'd rather live in honest turmoil than naive happiness. i'd rather live with people who ask questions than people who are content. i need people who eat books and devour theories, not people who live on bread and milk. they have to be wild, with every ounce of their being, and live for things that already are, not things they've made to be things. i need the people who are burning.
i live in flames.
where are the people who live in the world and can exact formulas and dances from it? not the people who impose false numbers and spins, who candy-coat it in manufactured colours. i would only dye things if i found the yellow in a blossom, never engineer a neon. that's nothing but the backs of our eyelids and they have no other place.
we have to build the future with the stones we have rather than imagining it with gold we have not. i want to hear you scream and believe the sound of your own voice.
i am so damn tired of religious people and i don't even know any yet. i'm afraid to read my bible for fear it will make me want to act like a christian.
steinbeck wrote about one little boy who lay on his stomach for hours watching an anthill and another who ruined it to see the ants scatter, frantic. i can never seem to reconcile them in me. one is always punching, flailing, and the other won't even fight back. they'll die of old age and i'll live on, an epileptic marionette until i end up stroking, paralyzed on one side and convulsing on the other. how can i split so precisely, a pared apple? pared in pairs, possessed by a pair, one arm is swinging like a helicopter. my favourite thing is kitchens and living rooms joined by one long wooden table.
i'd rather live in honest turmoil than naive happiness. i'd rather live with people who ask questions than people who are content. i need people who eat books and devour theories, not people who live on bread and milk. they have to be wild, with every ounce of their being, and live for things that already are, not things they've made to be things. i need the people who are burning.
i live in flames.
where are the people who live in the world and can exact formulas and dances from it? not the people who impose false numbers and spins, who candy-coat it in manufactured colours. i would only dye things if i found the yellow in a blossom, never engineer a neon. that's nothing but the backs of our eyelids and they have no other place.
we have to build the future with the stones we have rather than imagining it with gold we have not. i want to hear you scream and believe the sound of your own voice.
i am so damn tired of religious people and i don't even know any yet. i'm afraid to read my bible for fear it will make me want to act like a christian.
he is two people, and i love the one who smiles in english
even when i rage in the morning and rail in my mind, i have favourites. they are
birch and beech and aspen. they are flushed cheeks and jam. cobblestones and steeples, patchwork farmland. sausage, onions, two-man bands. duets and wooden flutes, stairwells that echo. chagall and the balkans, corduroys, and cardigans. leather sandals and light yellow, maroon and dark grey. white tea, lemonade, poppies, black-eyed susans. foxes and whales and sparrows, hills and green oceans. scarves and sundresses, steinbeck and safran foer, cummings, sexton, the appalachians and their scottish immigrants, kayaks, cherries, music that twangs and music that glides, postcards from street vendors and delivery-men on bicycles, bangs that lie flat and bangs that protrude, the magical way that the british pronounce jaguar, very thin pens, empty notebooks, grocery lists or sketches found on the ground, falconers, men who snore in the subway, bathing suits, cemeteries, grey cats and cats with orange stripes and cats with tuxedos, rag rugs, batman, hoops, rose gold, pearls, strong winds that moan, lace, atlantis, amelia earhart, diners that are always open, descriptions of people's ancestors, lisps, different coloured eyes, trains, beads, mixing bowls, quilts, little kids who peek under bathroom stalls, the cameras that are inside bodies during surgery, the middle crease of anything, sealing wax, letters with umlauts, fountains, bridges, naked germans, peaches, barrettes, floral patterns, ribbons, freckles, milkshakes, lime juice, disposable cameras, cowboys, the grand tetons, lingerie, empty brown bottles, throwing pennies on the ground, grammar, long foreign words, naming streets, maine, crusty bread, dusty streets that smell warm, stoops, shops that open their windows in the summer, midnight christmas eve services, candles, valentines, stories about angels, prophecies, used book stores, my grandma's porch, swings, tall tales and the people who tell them, the president's daughters, the state of the union, sagebrush duns, boulders, ivy, soccer cleats, gymnastic rings, lipstick, braids, brown eyes, men that babysit, tutors, interns, the polar bear plunge, titles tom hanks' whooping laugh, mild fevers, places with no sirens, melon vines, gardens, wells, the smell of cigarettes, the word timshel, all kinds of chairs, research, art therapy, dream interpretations, hula hoops, lollipops, marzipan, rolling pins, aprons that flatter, long hair, paper cranes, rearranging furniture, anastasia, men with mustaches, black squirrels, beating rugs, little boys who don't cry when they fall down, benches, mustard, wooden floors, porch swings, lemon curd, jocks who are friends with artists who are friends with scientists who are friends with teachers, northern lights, bears, zoos, roller coasters, mountains that meet plains, spray paint, babies that nap, carpenters, masks, afghans, umbrellas, ellis island and people who stay in their own countries, ginger beer, heartbeats, collarbones, soaps that smell like cinnamon, baby oil, airplanes, giraffes, farmers, public school teachers, musicals, pioneers, inventions, patents, frozen lakes, the sound of cars in the rain, children who eat all their dinner, breezes, creeks, calloused feet, strapless rompers that don't fall down, friendly strays, fountain pens, houses where shoes are left at the door, putting things in boxes, packing, some extended families, cities that sleep and cities that don't, villagers, farriers, raccoon tails, kisses, karaoke, dressing up, free samples, interviews, bumps on writing fingers, impermanence, roots, and museums.
i'd pay to be anywhere but home. mund. mund-kauen. tomaten-mund.
er isst wie ein kamel. er fuettert.
tomaten mund.
i'm paying to watch tomatoes die.
anything but the comforts of my own phone. cellophane is crackling round my brain.
he has a benign face, broad and creased. the one across the table has two duffel bags. he's sprawling out longer and longer like a lawn or a lectures. soon his leg will be high in my lap.
i know it's less about paths and more about how you walk, but i'm so young.
birch and beech and aspen. they are flushed cheeks and jam. cobblestones and steeples, patchwork farmland. sausage, onions, two-man bands. duets and wooden flutes, stairwells that echo. chagall and the balkans, corduroys, and cardigans. leather sandals and light yellow, maroon and dark grey. white tea, lemonade, poppies, black-eyed susans. foxes and whales and sparrows, hills and green oceans. scarves and sundresses, steinbeck and safran foer, cummings, sexton, the appalachians and their scottish immigrants, kayaks, cherries, music that twangs and music that glides, postcards from street vendors and delivery-men on bicycles, bangs that lie flat and bangs that protrude, the magical way that the british pronounce jaguar, very thin pens, empty notebooks, grocery lists or sketches found on the ground, falconers, men who snore in the subway, bathing suits, cemeteries, grey cats and cats with orange stripes and cats with tuxedos, rag rugs, batman, hoops, rose gold, pearls, strong winds that moan, lace, atlantis, amelia earhart, diners that are always open, descriptions of people's ancestors, lisps, different coloured eyes, trains, beads, mixing bowls, quilts, little kids who peek under bathroom stalls, the cameras that are inside bodies during surgery, the middle crease of anything, sealing wax, letters with umlauts, fountains, bridges, naked germans, peaches, barrettes, floral patterns, ribbons, freckles, milkshakes, lime juice, disposable cameras, cowboys, the grand tetons, lingerie, empty brown bottles, throwing pennies on the ground, grammar, long foreign words, naming streets, maine, crusty bread, dusty streets that smell warm, stoops, shops that open their windows in the summer, midnight christmas eve services, candles, valentines, stories about angels, prophecies, used book stores, my grandma's porch, swings, tall tales and the people who tell them, the president's daughters, the state of the union, sagebrush duns, boulders, ivy, soccer cleats, gymnastic rings, lipstick, braids, brown eyes, men that babysit, tutors, interns, the polar bear plunge, titles tom hanks' whooping laugh, mild fevers, places with no sirens, melon vines, gardens, wells, the smell of cigarettes, the word timshel, all kinds of chairs, research, art therapy, dream interpretations, hula hoops, lollipops, marzipan, rolling pins, aprons that flatter, long hair, paper cranes, rearranging furniture, anastasia, men with mustaches, black squirrels, beating rugs, little boys who don't cry when they fall down, benches, mustard, wooden floors, porch swings, lemon curd, jocks who are friends with artists who are friends with scientists who are friends with teachers, northern lights, bears, zoos, roller coasters, mountains that meet plains, spray paint, babies that nap, carpenters, masks, afghans, umbrellas, ellis island and people who stay in their own countries, ginger beer, heartbeats, collarbones, soaps that smell like cinnamon, baby oil, airplanes, giraffes, farmers, public school teachers, musicals, pioneers, inventions, patents, frozen lakes, the sound of cars in the rain, children who eat all their dinner, breezes, creeks, calloused feet, strapless rompers that don't fall down, friendly strays, fountain pens, houses where shoes are left at the door, putting things in boxes, packing, some extended families, cities that sleep and cities that don't, villagers, farriers, raccoon tails, kisses, karaoke, dressing up, free samples, interviews, bumps on writing fingers, impermanence, roots, and museums.
i'd pay to be anywhere but home. mund. mund-kauen. tomaten-mund.
er isst wie ein kamel. er fuettert.
tomaten mund.
i'm paying to watch tomatoes die.
anything but the comforts of my own phone. cellophane is crackling round my brain.
he has a benign face, broad and creased. the one across the table has two duffel bags. he's sprawling out longer and longer like a lawn or a lectures. soon his leg will be high in my lap.
i know it's less about paths and more about how you walk, but i'm so young.
anatomy
how did we come to live in an age where we can open people up, slide back the two curtains of their chest, and sew them back up, like embroidery, stitch their hearts back together, like a torn pair of blue jeans?
... also, ICE CREAM TRUCKS?
... also, ICE CREAM TRUCKS?
letztes maerz
some men become their fathers. other become their bullies. some even become trees. but very few become themselves. when you are in a room with a hallways outside and the door open, the people walking by have only one face. they glance in as the pass by, grinning, scowling, lost in thought. my memories, my childhood memories of my father, are out in the hallways. their eyebrows are pulled down tight. they crackle with lightning. i waited years for him to walk through my door, for that man who is not only himself, but also me.
everything is wide open, a window through which to leap.
these earmuffs- they hide me from new york's mutters and from the boys watching my reflection in the subway window. today i met a man with no nose and only after he walked away did i see what wasn't there. he knocked on the bathroom door, apologizing when i turned the sign from occupied to vacant. he asked if he was allowed in and i beckoned him through. deep in my cocoa cappucino (say it out loud), wondering if his mind was all there, it struck me that his nose was gone as well and that they may have deserted him together, eloped, left him chunnering with one half of his face in a grin, the other half lonely. he had nothing left to fear, save the embarrassment of interrupting a half-naked girl taking a piss.
the beggars don't ask from their own. every eighth or so sunday, i lose, i lose my fear. by the next morning, it has crept back into my belly, shivering and pulsing, out of its coffin.
if i weren't a celebrity, i would be a teacher in a one room schoolhouse. the future is grey and green like that atlantic that spliced my life, but i'm waiting hand and foot on cherry season until she is ready to take flight. if i could, i would bind books; the thing that bores me most is a newborn. i love surprises, but seeing that i've believed a lie makes me cry. if i were in my mother's kitchen, i would feel safe enough to read this out loud to you. i want to be a prophet and invent the airplane; my heart is a fox and a box, a set of boxes like russian dolls. i am a pyramid. i dream of robins laying eggs, girls with my name, and forgetting the baby at the park. the homeless men raise her as their own. my first memory is of the cake at my sister's birth and her toothless state, but before that i was somewhere in the forest, listening to the rain.
fail fast, he said, fail fast.
everything is wide open, a window through which to leap.
these earmuffs- they hide me from new york's mutters and from the boys watching my reflection in the subway window. today i met a man with no nose and only after he walked away did i see what wasn't there. he knocked on the bathroom door, apologizing when i turned the sign from occupied to vacant. he asked if he was allowed in and i beckoned him through. deep in my cocoa cappucino (say it out loud), wondering if his mind was all there, it struck me that his nose was gone as well and that they may have deserted him together, eloped, left him chunnering with one half of his face in a grin, the other half lonely. he had nothing left to fear, save the embarrassment of interrupting a half-naked girl taking a piss.
the beggars don't ask from their own. every eighth or so sunday, i lose, i lose my fear. by the next morning, it has crept back into my belly, shivering and pulsing, out of its coffin.
if i weren't a celebrity, i would be a teacher in a one room schoolhouse. the future is grey and green like that atlantic that spliced my life, but i'm waiting hand and foot on cherry season until she is ready to take flight. if i could, i would bind books; the thing that bores me most is a newborn. i love surprises, but seeing that i've believed a lie makes me cry. if i were in my mother's kitchen, i would feel safe enough to read this out loud to you. i want to be a prophet and invent the airplane; my heart is a fox and a box, a set of boxes like russian dolls. i am a pyramid. i dream of robins laying eggs, girls with my name, and forgetting the baby at the park. the homeless men raise her as their own. my first memory is of the cake at my sister's birth and her toothless state, but before that i was somewhere in the forest, listening to the rain.
fail fast, he said, fail fast.
9.7.11
i choose you
This week’s papers have been bursting to the brim with Egypt’s crumbling government, Wikileaks, Kabul’s bombings, polio vaccines, Mandela’s illness, Kim Jong-Il’s successor, and the deportation of Uganda’s lesbians. But the most pressing issue cartwheeling through my brain? Grocery shopping.
My neighbourhood in New York City is a neighbourhood of barbershops converted into bookstores where the one man is shaved while ten more talk politics over blaring reggae. It is a neighbourhood of collard greens and bellowing church choirs and brownstone architecture and graffiti in sultry oranges and greens, of fire escapes and stoops and creased women pushing wire hampers down the cracking sidewalks. The grocery store on the corner jostles its customers up against bins of seeping papayas and bloody buckets of pigs’ tails; the Baptist church down the block was built by freed slaves two centuries ago. When I first moved to Bed-Stuy, I was one of the only white people for blocks. Other than mine, blue eyes were rare, and the only blondes I ever saw on the street often turned out to be my roommate. Within the past year, however, gentrification has hit full force, lining coffee shops, vegan co-ops, art galleries, and hipsters clad in their grandma’s skirts and faux-fox.
Neighbourhoods, cities, countries—they are all living organisms. They eat, breathe, grow, shrink, evolve, and migrate. They can contract diseases. Bed-Stuy’s hipster population could be compared to a pregnancy, one indicating the birth of a new culture. However, pregnancies are parasitic by nature, and this new parasite may be more than the neighbourhood can handle.
The white population is comprised mainly of liberal arts graduates from middle class backgrounds. These are the type of newcomers that replace former residents, drive up real estate value, and effectively raise the rent of the entire neighbourhood. The arrival of the white demographic also marks the departure of many of the neighbourhood’s businesses as the demand for hair-braiding salons and R&B record stores dwindles. I see most of the young white residents getting off the subway by the Fulton Street Grocery laden with recyclable Trader Joe’s bags full of fair-trade and organic products like brie, rosehip jam, and soy bacon. The local grocery store has felt the loss of its business enough to start carrying merchandise like almond milk and havarti cheese, but the commodities cost twice as much as they would even in a ritzy Manhattan health shop. If the new demographic can be compared to a fetus, it is evident that the population represented by the pregnant mother is weakening and wasting away.
Here I must pause and make a confession: in my opinion, havarti is heavenly. I own several of my grandmother’s skirts. I am a young white student who has attended a liberal arts school and lives in an artists’ collective; my need for housing played a role in the raising of my building’s rent. I am the parasite.
I am the parasite. But the rosehip jam in my refrigerator was sent from my mother in France. The bakery in which I am currently sitting is named for its original owner, Miss Dahlia, a freed slave, and I shop at the grocery stores I can see from my window. Buying food can be an ethically-complex process. Were peasants were coerced into selling their fertile land to multinational corporations? Does buying imported food from the neighbourhood grocery store undermine American farms? Am I paying outrageous prices for peaches in support of Bed-Stuy’s merchants and maids living in relative poverty only to leave the third-world fruit harvesters to pay the true price: absolute poverty at the hands of greedy corporations eager to extort surplus value from the workers? Myopic charity is just as damning as Dickens’ telescopic philanthropy, but I often feel helpless in a world where every meal I eat is somehow morally reprehensible.
So I choose Bed-Stuy. We have to pick our battles, find the pocket of injustice to which we find ourselves called. If each of us attends to our portion, acting as body parts in one united healing body, the entire corrupt system will begin to crumble. I have chosen Bedford-Stuyvesant, with its tropical turbans and hip-hop. This inevitable gentrification doesn’t have to be a feeble mother’s parasitic pregnancy. It can be a healthy pregnancy resulting in the birth of a joyful new baby to a robust, diverse, and harmonious family, and in pursuit of that goal, I will continue to smile at my neighbours over piles of chicken feet, mangos, and grits.
My neighbourhood in New York City is a neighbourhood of barbershops converted into bookstores where the one man is shaved while ten more talk politics over blaring reggae. It is a neighbourhood of collard greens and bellowing church choirs and brownstone architecture and graffiti in sultry oranges and greens, of fire escapes and stoops and creased women pushing wire hampers down the cracking sidewalks. The grocery store on the corner jostles its customers up against bins of seeping papayas and bloody buckets of pigs’ tails; the Baptist church down the block was built by freed slaves two centuries ago. When I first moved to Bed-Stuy, I was one of the only white people for blocks. Other than mine, blue eyes were rare, and the only blondes I ever saw on the street often turned out to be my roommate. Within the past year, however, gentrification has hit full force, lining coffee shops, vegan co-ops, art galleries, and hipsters clad in their grandma’s skirts and faux-fox.
Neighbourhoods, cities, countries—they are all living organisms. They eat, breathe, grow, shrink, evolve, and migrate. They can contract diseases. Bed-Stuy’s hipster population could be compared to a pregnancy, one indicating the birth of a new culture. However, pregnancies are parasitic by nature, and this new parasite may be more than the neighbourhood can handle.
The white population is comprised mainly of liberal arts graduates from middle class backgrounds. These are the type of newcomers that replace former residents, drive up real estate value, and effectively raise the rent of the entire neighbourhood. The arrival of the white demographic also marks the departure of many of the neighbourhood’s businesses as the demand for hair-braiding salons and R&B record stores dwindles. I see most of the young white residents getting off the subway by the Fulton Street Grocery laden with recyclable Trader Joe’s bags full of fair-trade and organic products like brie, rosehip jam, and soy bacon. The local grocery store has felt the loss of its business enough to start carrying merchandise like almond milk and havarti cheese, but the commodities cost twice as much as they would even in a ritzy Manhattan health shop. If the new demographic can be compared to a fetus, it is evident that the population represented by the pregnant mother is weakening and wasting away.
Here I must pause and make a confession: in my opinion, havarti is heavenly. I own several of my grandmother’s skirts. I am a young white student who has attended a liberal arts school and lives in an artists’ collective; my need for housing played a role in the raising of my building’s rent. I am the parasite.
I am the parasite. But the rosehip jam in my refrigerator was sent from my mother in France. The bakery in which I am currently sitting is named for its original owner, Miss Dahlia, a freed slave, and I shop at the grocery stores I can see from my window. Buying food can be an ethically-complex process. Were peasants were coerced into selling their fertile land to multinational corporations? Does buying imported food from the neighbourhood grocery store undermine American farms? Am I paying outrageous prices for peaches in support of Bed-Stuy’s merchants and maids living in relative poverty only to leave the third-world fruit harvesters to pay the true price: absolute poverty at the hands of greedy corporations eager to extort surplus value from the workers? Myopic charity is just as damning as Dickens’ telescopic philanthropy, but I often feel helpless in a world where every meal I eat is somehow morally reprehensible.
So I choose Bed-Stuy. We have to pick our battles, find the pocket of injustice to which we find ourselves called. If each of us attends to our portion, acting as body parts in one united healing body, the entire corrupt system will begin to crumble. I have chosen Bedford-Stuyvesant, with its tropical turbans and hip-hop. This inevitable gentrification doesn’t have to be a feeble mother’s parasitic pregnancy. It can be a healthy pregnancy resulting in the birth of a joyful new baby to a robust, diverse, and harmonious family, and in pursuit of that goal, I will continue to smile at my neighbours over piles of chicken feet, mangos, and grits.
they asked me for a testimony
Every summer, my father would give me a green towel with a tall, curly B on one side, one of a set of four that he and my mother that some distant relative gave them at their wedding. My father was and is a small, quick man with freckles and an auburn mustache. He would take me out into the yard with the towel and stand in the sun, his freckles blossoming across his face and arms, and spread the towel on the grass, saying, "Everything you want to take with you, Erin. Everything must fit on that towel."
Maybe it wasn't every summer. Maybe it was one of my brother's blankets instead of the towels that we finally got rid of last year when the tall, white Bs finally frayed. And I know we weren't always out in the yard, because more often than not we didn't have one. But in my eighteen years, I have lived in eighteen houses, some with yards and some without. Everywhere we went (my family, a tiny caravan of six nomads), we carried our possessions with us, each of us with our own bag and one extra suitcase for my mother's wooden bookends, the rolling pin we gave her years ago, and a box of Christmas ornaments.
I learned to walk in an apartment just north of New York City. But I grew up dancing and eating chocolate chips out of cookie batter in downtown Detroit, drinking hot soy milk from tin cup and eating empty-heart plant with chopsticks and saving sparrows in China, lying in the mud missing my family and watching the magpies hide in the coconut trees during the rainy season in Malaysia, talking to Mormon men at the playground and eating eel hotpot in Hong Kong, riding a pink bike with purple tassels on the handlebars in Illinois, walking past fields of poppies growing over mines and the stubble of bombed houses to buy bread for thirty cents from an old woman in a tan headscarf at the bazaar in Kosovo, shouting echoes out of bell towers and cathedral spires overlooking cobblestone cities and hopping ancient stone walls into meadows to roll down hills or skinny dip in creeks in Germany, crying frozen tears as blizzards ripped at my cheeks in Minnesota, eating apples straight out of the orchard and grapes straight off the vine and nodding to the farmers wearing suspenders near the French border, and sitting in the back of a tired Communist opera house and watching the neon glow of night clubs from my balcony in Macedonia.
When my parents first brought me to New York to live in a tiny cinderblock apartment near the Hudson, just a few weeks after I was born just outside Chicago, they brought suitcases full of books and dreams, waiting for the day that God would send them over the ocean to share Christ's love with his people. As a child, I was their mirror, carrying a picture-book Bible to kindergarten to show my Chinese friends the illustrations of Jesus, leaving my home as soon as I was old enough to touch my left ear with my right hand at age six, the age when missionary children left for boarding school.
As I grew older, out of braids and into braces, I fell in love- not with any scrawny junior high boy, but with Jesus. An Kosovar man baptized me in a white robe at a lake teeming with sunbathers and trash and my mirror began to crack. Ever-stubborn and willful as I grew out of braces and into mascara, my independence grew exponentially, leading me both to defiantly declare that "after nine years of living without my parents, I no longer needed their advice or guidance, and would in fact eat chocolate cake for breakfast if I so pleased" and to passionately pursue my own personal relationship with Jesus.
Jesus came to dwell on this earth for a short while, God in man's body, a tangible expression of God's character and love, and the Holy Spirit is his spirit come to dwell on the earth forever. Through written accounts of Jesus' life and through interactions with his spirit and others who know him, I continue to grow in intimacy with Jesus. Sometimes I pull a chair up beside me for him while we talk, often I have shouted at him, often I have sung to him, and I am never as good of a listener as I would like to be. Our arguments have left me lying prostrate, my face and clenched fists pressed into the ground, our conversations have me standing on benches with my hands in the air, stretched up towards him, and more than once I have felt the heat and weight of his arms around me.
To truly know Jesus is to trust him, and that trust is the core of my faith.
Somehow, I found my way back to the beginning, in a brick apartment between the Hudson and the train tracks leading into Harlem. But this time I came alone, just a few weeks after my eighteenth birthday. As they have been since I was a little girl skinning my knees under the palm trees in Malaysia and running through patches of nettles in the Black Forest, my family is five thousand miles away from me. Six years ago my faith became more than a mirror of my parents' actions, and six months ago, my life began eerily to echo theirs as I came to the United States with a few cardboard boxes full of books and dreams, waiting for God to take me somewhere that his people needed to know his love. My own journey finally became a mirror of my parents' not because I imitated them, but because all have chosen to imitate Jesus. My mother and father went from New York across the ocean to Asia and Europe and I have crossed the ocean from Asia and Europe to New York to a place full of wealthy bearded boys and wispy vintage girls smoking pot, to a place of professors mocking my faith as lunacy, to a place heralded as the forerunner of the sexual revolution and experimentation movement, to a place of mere shells of humans having traded in their hearts for cold intellect: all symptoms of the loneliness found in a life without Jesus.
Sometimes it seems like my life has been nothing but aimless roaming across the face of the earth, with nowhere to rest. When I was younger, the seventh or eighth time we moved, I found a corner of the sidewalk outside my house broken off by a persistent oak root and carried it in my suitcase for years, determined to have a piece of a home. The sidewalk is forgotten in some house maybe in the Balkans or in France, and sometimes the wandering wind still makes me homesick for nowhere. Yet even on the windiest of days, I know that every step we made, every step I make, has had a purpose. Once in Italy, a dark, elegant woman walking tall and slim in diamonds and black caught her pale hand on her necklace, and it snapped, cascading black glass beads onto Rome's ancient streets. She walked on, stiletto heels clicking, hardly looking down, and my friends and I stood on the street corner, picking the jeweled beads out of the gutter and saving them in our pockets, watching the light glimmer or their facets. I have the earth's forgotten beauty in my pockets to treasure for myself and to share, collected from the soft eyes of an unnamed orphaned baby in Rwanda, from the clicking beaded braids of a little girl dancing in a disabled school in Kenya, from creased hands of an old German woman making kartoffelsalat, from the grin of a young Muslim man from a village in Kosovo talking about going to the university in another country, in the voice of my bisexual, atheist roommate reminiscing about riding her bicycle in Chicago. God leads me one small step at a time, and though I may have no clarity about the next place I will be, I have trust and a pocketful of beauty to move my feet forward one small step at a time.
Maybe it wasn't every summer. Maybe it was one of my brother's blankets instead of the towels that we finally got rid of last year when the tall, white Bs finally frayed. And I know we weren't always out in the yard, because more often than not we didn't have one. But in my eighteen years, I have lived in eighteen houses, some with yards and some without. Everywhere we went (my family, a tiny caravan of six nomads), we carried our possessions with us, each of us with our own bag and one extra suitcase for my mother's wooden bookends, the rolling pin we gave her years ago, and a box of Christmas ornaments.
I learned to walk in an apartment just north of New York City. But I grew up dancing and eating chocolate chips out of cookie batter in downtown Detroit, drinking hot soy milk from tin cup and eating empty-heart plant with chopsticks and saving sparrows in China, lying in the mud missing my family and watching the magpies hide in the coconut trees during the rainy season in Malaysia, talking to Mormon men at the playground and eating eel hotpot in Hong Kong, riding a pink bike with purple tassels on the handlebars in Illinois, walking past fields of poppies growing over mines and the stubble of bombed houses to buy bread for thirty cents from an old woman in a tan headscarf at the bazaar in Kosovo, shouting echoes out of bell towers and cathedral spires overlooking cobblestone cities and hopping ancient stone walls into meadows to roll down hills or skinny dip in creeks in Germany, crying frozen tears as blizzards ripped at my cheeks in Minnesota, eating apples straight out of the orchard and grapes straight off the vine and nodding to the farmers wearing suspenders near the French border, and sitting in the back of a tired Communist opera house and watching the neon glow of night clubs from my balcony in Macedonia.
When my parents first brought me to New York to live in a tiny cinderblock apartment near the Hudson, just a few weeks after I was born just outside Chicago, they brought suitcases full of books and dreams, waiting for the day that God would send them over the ocean to share Christ's love with his people. As a child, I was their mirror, carrying a picture-book Bible to kindergarten to show my Chinese friends the illustrations of Jesus, leaving my home as soon as I was old enough to touch my left ear with my right hand at age six, the age when missionary children left for boarding school.
As I grew older, out of braids and into braces, I fell in love- not with any scrawny junior high boy, but with Jesus. An Kosovar man baptized me in a white robe at a lake teeming with sunbathers and trash and my mirror began to crack. Ever-stubborn and willful as I grew out of braces and into mascara, my independence grew exponentially, leading me both to defiantly declare that "after nine years of living without my parents, I no longer needed their advice or guidance, and would in fact eat chocolate cake for breakfast if I so pleased" and to passionately pursue my own personal relationship with Jesus.
Jesus came to dwell on this earth for a short while, God in man's body, a tangible expression of God's character and love, and the Holy Spirit is his spirit come to dwell on the earth forever. Through written accounts of Jesus' life and through interactions with his spirit and others who know him, I continue to grow in intimacy with Jesus. Sometimes I pull a chair up beside me for him while we talk, often I have shouted at him, often I have sung to him, and I am never as good of a listener as I would like to be. Our arguments have left me lying prostrate, my face and clenched fists pressed into the ground, our conversations have me standing on benches with my hands in the air, stretched up towards him, and more than once I have felt the heat and weight of his arms around me.
To truly know Jesus is to trust him, and that trust is the core of my faith.
Somehow, I found my way back to the beginning, in a brick apartment between the Hudson and the train tracks leading into Harlem. But this time I came alone, just a few weeks after my eighteenth birthday. As they have been since I was a little girl skinning my knees under the palm trees in Malaysia and running through patches of nettles in the Black Forest, my family is five thousand miles away from me. Six years ago my faith became more than a mirror of my parents' actions, and six months ago, my life began eerily to echo theirs as I came to the United States with a few cardboard boxes full of books and dreams, waiting for God to take me somewhere that his people needed to know his love. My own journey finally became a mirror of my parents' not because I imitated them, but because all have chosen to imitate Jesus. My mother and father went from New York across the ocean to Asia and Europe and I have crossed the ocean from Asia and Europe to New York to a place full of wealthy bearded boys and wispy vintage girls smoking pot, to a place of professors mocking my faith as lunacy, to a place heralded as the forerunner of the sexual revolution and experimentation movement, to a place of mere shells of humans having traded in their hearts for cold intellect: all symptoms of the loneliness found in a life without Jesus.
Sometimes it seems like my life has been nothing but aimless roaming across the face of the earth, with nowhere to rest. When I was younger, the seventh or eighth time we moved, I found a corner of the sidewalk outside my house broken off by a persistent oak root and carried it in my suitcase for years, determined to have a piece of a home. The sidewalk is forgotten in some house maybe in the Balkans or in France, and sometimes the wandering wind still makes me homesick for nowhere. Yet even on the windiest of days, I know that every step we made, every step I make, has had a purpose. Once in Italy, a dark, elegant woman walking tall and slim in diamonds and black caught her pale hand on her necklace, and it snapped, cascading black glass beads onto Rome's ancient streets. She walked on, stiletto heels clicking, hardly looking down, and my friends and I stood on the street corner, picking the jeweled beads out of the gutter and saving them in our pockets, watching the light glimmer or their facets. I have the earth's forgotten beauty in my pockets to treasure for myself and to share, collected from the soft eyes of an unnamed orphaned baby in Rwanda, from the clicking beaded braids of a little girl dancing in a disabled school in Kenya, from creased hands of an old German woman making kartoffelsalat, from the grin of a young Muslim man from a village in Kosovo talking about going to the university in another country, in the voice of my bisexual, atheist roommate reminiscing about riding her bicycle in Chicago. God leads me one small step at a time, and though I may have no clarity about the next place I will be, I have trust and a pocketful of beauty to move my feet forward one small step at a time.
gryphons: the cons
Sarah Lawrence College: where the men are women and the women wear nothing but mohawks. We commonly saw boys in lipstick and dresses smoking weed on the North Lawn or girls trotting about clad only in a handful of oak leaves taped to their bodies. They would gather at night, to drink and smoke and discuss hegemony or Foucault. Sarah Lawrence seemed to be located somewhere on the earth’s fringe, far away from everything but itself. Very few things existed except ourselves: no ethics, no objectivity, no conventions, no gods, no gender, no government. The world was ours to examine under the microscope and interpret as we saw fit—to dissect, to denounce, to decorate. The school took care to smash our presuppositions and beliefs from the colossal cornerstones they were into little heaps of rubble and sentiment; then they fed us. We simply ate books and research and art, gorged ourselves until we could hardly move, intense curiosity walled in by extreme apathy. Most sat, stagnant, and stewed in their formulas and philosophies. Few mastered the art of digestion: turning theory into practice, knowledge into action. Essentially, our studies were gluttony.
Francis Bacon named three purposes for study: delight, ornament, and ability. Sarah Lawrence indulged in the first two and neglected the latter almost entirely. The school was decadence itself, but though my year there was scholarly bliss, such luxury can be educationally lethal. Example: one girl I often sat beside spent the entire spring semester building naked babies out of rubber and nailing them to walls. She earned top marks and I withdrew. I had intended to stay and use the resources Sarah Lawrence offered for more altruistic purposes. In the end, however, I couldn’t justify a few years of boundless intellectual indulgence and only to spend the following decades shackled by debt.
It’s high time my education had an aim. Scholarly pursuits are not merely an end, but a means to an end. Certainly one of study’s purposes is to transform the minds of its apprentices, but, ideally, the process is cyclical and the transformation mutual. Study should lead students not only to examine but also to shape their given environment, to improve, to innovate, to invent—to identify and meet the world’s ever-present needs. Make no mistake, Sarah Lawrence quilted some of its colours onto my soul; I’ve a skull full of limericks and larks I gleaned there. But I’ve pasted together my crumbled cornerstones, and though they are altered, as I stand tall on them, I am reminded that I was made to be more than an intellectual epicure. My education is not solely for my benefit and I am accountable to something greater than myself. If I am anything at all, I am willing to be challenged, instructed, prepared—disciplined and discipled. Teach me how and I’ll wash the world’s feet.
Francis Bacon named three purposes for study: delight, ornament, and ability. Sarah Lawrence indulged in the first two and neglected the latter almost entirely. The school was decadence itself, but though my year there was scholarly bliss, such luxury can be educationally lethal. Example: one girl I often sat beside spent the entire spring semester building naked babies out of rubber and nailing them to walls. She earned top marks and I withdrew. I had intended to stay and use the resources Sarah Lawrence offered for more altruistic purposes. In the end, however, I couldn’t justify a few years of boundless intellectual indulgence and only to spend the following decades shackled by debt.
It’s high time my education had an aim. Scholarly pursuits are not merely an end, but a means to an end. Certainly one of study’s purposes is to transform the minds of its apprentices, but, ideally, the process is cyclical and the transformation mutual. Study should lead students not only to examine but also to shape their given environment, to improve, to innovate, to invent—to identify and meet the world’s ever-present needs. Make no mistake, Sarah Lawrence quilted some of its colours onto my soul; I’ve a skull full of limericks and larks I gleaned there. But I’ve pasted together my crumbled cornerstones, and though they are altered, as I stand tall on them, I am reminded that I was made to be more than an intellectual epicure. My education is not solely for my benefit and I am accountable to something greater than myself. If I am anything at all, I am willing to be challenged, instructed, prepared—disciplined and discipled. Teach me how and I’ll wash the world’s feet.
literary arts
When I was young, I dreamed every night about being on a raft in the middle of the ocean. My family sat beside me, my father freckled and mustached, my mother with her belly curved and pregnant, my baby sister bald and bug-eyed. The wind pushed the raft to and fro in the water, from America’s beaches down to the Pacific Islands, up through the Arctic floes and all the way around to the Ivory Coast. As we drifted over each border, our faces would change. Near China, my sister suddenly had narrow, brown eyes. In Scandinavia, my mother’s hair went sleek and blond. Along the coast of Africa, my father’s mustache dwindled away as his skin burned dark. They were unrecognizable. They spoke in characters and clicks; they forgot how to pronounce my name.
I have lived in over twenty houses in seven countries and five states. Though my nightmares were nothing but dreams, crossing so many borders does change a person’s spirit. I spent almost every day in kindergarten exiled in a corner, braiding strips of cloth, because it was simpler to isolate me than to teach me Chinese. My nanny rewarded me not with chocolates, but with eel eyeballs, soy bean ice cream, and pickled bird feet. I never had a dog, but I did have two chicks dyed magenta and green. Getting ready to go on a hike didn’t mean packing a lunch, but rather finding a stick to ward off monkeys. From age six onward, I spent eight months of each year thousands of miles away from my family. As a child, I was often followed by crowds wherever I went, all whispering and pointing, the bravest rushing up to rub my cheeks or pull my hair. They thought I was a bewitched doll, with my white skin and pale blue eyes. For years, I was the only one of my friends legally permitted to have brothers and sisters. My childhood heroes included a 13th century Albanian who fought against the Ottomans, Daniel (of the lion’s den), the tank man from Tiananmen Square, one of my dorm dads who had biceps so big he couldn’t touch his shoulders, and the United Nations. I bake in Fahrenheit and dress by Celsius. Boys from five different countries have talked of marrying me and I refused them all. For years, we only watched the news in the winter because in the summer the peach trees grew up around the satellite dish. I’ve lived in houses with bullets in the walls and the marks of Serbian military cleats in the floor, in houses near Mother Teresa’s and Goethe’s and Napoleon’s and Jay-Z’s, in houses with frost on the insides of the windows, in houses that almost never had electricity or water, in houses next to castles, minefields, and brothels.
There are things I want to say. I have stories to tell and poems to pen. One day my mind and I will die, but I want my words to be immortal. Of the things we hear on the radio and in books and on the television, it sometimes seems that only about 10% of them are true things. I don’t necessarily mean that they are lies, but I mean that they are not real, beautiful, meaningful truths. I have true things to say, things that are 100% true, mindblowingly true—the type of truth that comes straight from the core of living, like the dream about the raft.
Even more, I have more truths than just my own. I have things to say for hundreds of people and places that can’t speak for themselves. I write for Hope, my brightest Kenyan student, a quadriplegic whose parents neglected her to the point of refusing a free operation that would have given her the use of her legs. I write for the Black Forest and its suspendered villagers. I write for he Rwandan boy whose mother died before naming him, leaving him alone and anonymous in an orphanage where I worked. I write for Edip’s grandma, who taught me to garden and lived through the Kosovo massacres to emerge not unscathed, but strong and full of joy and for the raging red poppy fields along the road to Macedonia. I write for the egg vendor on my street who wore the same sweat-stained shirt every day and survived on little more than fifty cents a day, for my little friend Mi who saved sparrows and had no future ahead of her but the factories, for the open-air markets with entire halved pigs spilling their intestines at the feet of old women croaking out the prices of their persimmons, and for a thousand more.
I want to write it all down, keep writing everything down as long as I live, and I want to teach other people to write themselves down as well. Expression is the right of every human, and so many of us have been kept voiceless for far too long. I pledge my pen to speaking for those who can’t speak for themselves and my hands to reaching those who are searching for words. Together we can record what we’ve seen and make it heard—the terrible, the beautiful, and the true.
I have lived in over twenty houses in seven countries and five states. Though my nightmares were nothing but dreams, crossing so many borders does change a person’s spirit. I spent almost every day in kindergarten exiled in a corner, braiding strips of cloth, because it was simpler to isolate me than to teach me Chinese. My nanny rewarded me not with chocolates, but with eel eyeballs, soy bean ice cream, and pickled bird feet. I never had a dog, but I did have two chicks dyed magenta and green. Getting ready to go on a hike didn’t mean packing a lunch, but rather finding a stick to ward off monkeys. From age six onward, I spent eight months of each year thousands of miles away from my family. As a child, I was often followed by crowds wherever I went, all whispering and pointing, the bravest rushing up to rub my cheeks or pull my hair. They thought I was a bewitched doll, with my white skin and pale blue eyes. For years, I was the only one of my friends legally permitted to have brothers and sisters. My childhood heroes included a 13th century Albanian who fought against the Ottomans, Daniel (of the lion’s den), the tank man from Tiananmen Square, one of my dorm dads who had biceps so big he couldn’t touch his shoulders, and the United Nations. I bake in Fahrenheit and dress by Celsius. Boys from five different countries have talked of marrying me and I refused them all. For years, we only watched the news in the winter because in the summer the peach trees grew up around the satellite dish. I’ve lived in houses with bullets in the walls and the marks of Serbian military cleats in the floor, in houses near Mother Teresa’s and Goethe’s and Napoleon’s and Jay-Z’s, in houses with frost on the insides of the windows, in houses that almost never had electricity or water, in houses next to castles, minefields, and brothels.
There are things I want to say. I have stories to tell and poems to pen. One day my mind and I will die, but I want my words to be immortal. Of the things we hear on the radio and in books and on the television, it sometimes seems that only about 10% of them are true things. I don’t necessarily mean that they are lies, but I mean that they are not real, beautiful, meaningful truths. I have true things to say, things that are 100% true, mindblowingly true—the type of truth that comes straight from the core of living, like the dream about the raft.
Even more, I have more truths than just my own. I have things to say for hundreds of people and places that can’t speak for themselves. I write for Hope, my brightest Kenyan student, a quadriplegic whose parents neglected her to the point of refusing a free operation that would have given her the use of her legs. I write for the Black Forest and its suspendered villagers. I write for he Rwandan boy whose mother died before naming him, leaving him alone and anonymous in an orphanage where I worked. I write for Edip’s grandma, who taught me to garden and lived through the Kosovo massacres to emerge not unscathed, but strong and full of joy and for the raging red poppy fields along the road to Macedonia. I write for the egg vendor on my street who wore the same sweat-stained shirt every day and survived on little more than fifty cents a day, for my little friend Mi who saved sparrows and had no future ahead of her but the factories, for the open-air markets with entire halved pigs spilling their intestines at the feet of old women croaking out the prices of their persimmons, and for a thousand more.
I want to write it all down, keep writing everything down as long as I live, and I want to teach other people to write themselves down as well. Expression is the right of every human, and so many of us have been kept voiceless for far too long. I pledge my pen to speaking for those who can’t speak for themselves and my hands to reaching those who are searching for words. Together we can record what we’ve seen and make it heard—the terrible, the beautiful, and the true.
a last, grasping response
According to Peet, the pathways of change stem primarily from the organization of the people for the pursuit of an egalitarian society. The people who have no interest and are, in fact, abused by the status quo are the ones who will have the sufficient determination, strength, and cause to change the global hierarchy. The alternative theory Peet presents is a conglomeration of the strengths of Marxism, postmodernism, and feminism melted together to form a new theory of critical modernism working towards the achievement of communities of radical democracy.
The Marxist aspects seek to rescue modernity and give the control of the means of production to the people in order to expand the economic capacities of the poor and marginalized. Public control, collectivism, and democratic reasoning are the strengths of Marxism integrated into Peet’s approach. The poststructural aspects of Peet’s critical modernism focus primarily on examining power relations reproduced through knowledge control and ideologies of reason, science, and progress. By deconstructing the assumptions (informed by capitalism) that make developmentalism universalist, Eurocentric, and detrimental, the path can be cleared for local peoples to express their needs and meet said needs. The feminist aspect of Peet’s approach integrates women’s needs into the development discipline.
Using these theories, Peet desires to create locally-based communities, democratically self-governed and motivated by common compassion, reason, and ethics. The value of developmentalism in this is the transfer of the means of production and reproduction into the hands of the people; chiefly, that economic growth, with reproduction, must be perpetuated and promoted, merely regulated by locals rather than the state or multinationals. Modernity can be used to aid, and not to harm, the people of the earth. Developmentalism redefined as meeting universal needs locally defined by spreading power and access throughout the globe is an invaluable entity. Development is the act of giving people the means to reproduce life.
As far as what is to be done: In reading PDR’s pleas for recognition of the forgotten local peoples, in reading Peet’s cry for a radical democratic compassionate collective, and in reading all of our materials advocating for decentralization and redistribution of power, I am continually taken back to the teachings of Catholic justice workers and Martin Luther King’s rhetoric. Catholic social teaching, especially the teaching of Pope John Paul II, calls not only for social justice, but for social love—the equivalent of social justice motivated by an unconditional compassion for other humans. King’s theories call this unconditional social love “agape,” a love that flows unmotivated, spontaneous, and without expecting anything in return. While uniting a community out of necessity to overcome an abuse or gain justice is powerful, once the need is met, the danger always stands that the community may return to its previous stratified, scattered state. If community collectivism and distributism are motivated by social agape love, it is possible that Peet’s radically democratic collectives may be created and even sustained.
The power of love in uniting people despite their differences and in bringing about equality and selflessness is visible in King’s achievements in the fight against racism, in the base communities of Latin America started by liberation theologians, and in many brands of communes around the world. This social love, however, cannot be imposed from the top down. Taking a compassionate stance on economics and equality is the prerogative of the people; structural change will follow social movements from the grassroots. As elites, our role is to help the people to organize themselves through providing education and basic needs, by building genuine relationships with the faces behind the issues of poverty and inequity, by acting as a medium for their voices so that structural changes may follow the expression of their needs and agendas, and by always treating everyone with unconditional respect and compassion, whether they may be a Chinese peasant or a World Bank economist.
As to my role in these social movements and the empowerment of the people, to be perfectly honest, I do not necessarily see myself being involved in an organization directly challenging capitalism’s injustices. However, I do plan to work in an environment that indirectly challenges it by addressing issues of inequality and vulnerability through some sort of community organization: rather than organizing unions, working in a therapeutic or educational setting designed to allow people to express themselves, to be heard, and to heal.
Though, as the director of Kenya’s USAID education branch said, organizations often “waste” the majority of their money on the populations hardest to reach rather than targeting accessible and economically productive populations, my desire is to work with marginalized individuals who have been hurt by the modern world and forgotten by the system, whether through trauma due to private histories of domestic and sexual violence, or through more public problems like homelessness, poverty, and warfare. In my mind there are two avenues by which to address the problems present in modernity: attacking the causes of problems or treating the effects. I often feel guilty, as if the only valid way to initiate change is by attempting to directly eliminate structural violence by taking preventative measures and reforming the structure itself, but I also believe that working with the brokenness caused by structural violence is equally important in the battle for its elimination.
Challenging structural violence means addressing both the causes and working with those affected. Naturally, the two are not mutually exclusive; working as an art therapist with street children or teaching confessional writing in a high school for traumatized youth is not a separate task from working with welfare policies or social work. Working for humanitarian change at any level or sector means addressing issues at all levels of every sector, for all are interrelated and interdependent. While I may want to work directly with people in need of healing and love, others may want to work in policy or trade or agriculture to address the issues of structural neglect and suffering found there.
With every paragraph this becomes less of an essay and more of a reflective catalogue of Erin’s dreams for the future, but though I do not necessarily have specific plans to organize collectives of people for the purpose of empowering said populations, I do hope to always live in community. My desire would be to always live cooperatively, on compounds or in shared houses, with a group of people dedicated to spreading love and justice and beauty, whether through art or education or activism or community organization, whether they come from the elite class or the most destitute level of society, whether they come from a Western culture or another. I do not know where or with whom I want to work, although I know that I have never anywhere felt as immediate and deep a connection as I did in Rwanda, Kenya, and Kosovo—but surprisingly enough, I felt nearly the same love for south Yonkers when I began volunteering with Hispanic immigrants down near the projects.
I suppose my answer then is that I desire to work with individuals in need of love and healing, individuals that will compose a society of people finding wholeness and continuing the cycle of service and love they became a part of.
The Marxist aspects seek to rescue modernity and give the control of the means of production to the people in order to expand the economic capacities of the poor and marginalized. Public control, collectivism, and democratic reasoning are the strengths of Marxism integrated into Peet’s approach. The poststructural aspects of Peet’s critical modernism focus primarily on examining power relations reproduced through knowledge control and ideologies of reason, science, and progress. By deconstructing the assumptions (informed by capitalism) that make developmentalism universalist, Eurocentric, and detrimental, the path can be cleared for local peoples to express their needs and meet said needs. The feminist aspect of Peet’s approach integrates women’s needs into the development discipline.
Using these theories, Peet desires to create locally-based communities, democratically self-governed and motivated by common compassion, reason, and ethics. The value of developmentalism in this is the transfer of the means of production and reproduction into the hands of the people; chiefly, that economic growth, with reproduction, must be perpetuated and promoted, merely regulated by locals rather than the state or multinationals. Modernity can be used to aid, and not to harm, the people of the earth. Developmentalism redefined as meeting universal needs locally defined by spreading power and access throughout the globe is an invaluable entity. Development is the act of giving people the means to reproduce life.
As far as what is to be done: In reading PDR’s pleas for recognition of the forgotten local peoples, in reading Peet’s cry for a radical democratic compassionate collective, and in reading all of our materials advocating for decentralization and redistribution of power, I am continually taken back to the teachings of Catholic justice workers and Martin Luther King’s rhetoric. Catholic social teaching, especially the teaching of Pope John Paul II, calls not only for social justice, but for social love—the equivalent of social justice motivated by an unconditional compassion for other humans. King’s theories call this unconditional social love “agape,” a love that flows unmotivated, spontaneous, and without expecting anything in return. While uniting a community out of necessity to overcome an abuse or gain justice is powerful, once the need is met, the danger always stands that the community may return to its previous stratified, scattered state. If community collectivism and distributism are motivated by social agape love, it is possible that Peet’s radically democratic collectives may be created and even sustained.
The power of love in uniting people despite their differences and in bringing about equality and selflessness is visible in King’s achievements in the fight against racism, in the base communities of Latin America started by liberation theologians, and in many brands of communes around the world. This social love, however, cannot be imposed from the top down. Taking a compassionate stance on economics and equality is the prerogative of the people; structural change will follow social movements from the grassroots. As elites, our role is to help the people to organize themselves through providing education and basic needs, by building genuine relationships with the faces behind the issues of poverty and inequity, by acting as a medium for their voices so that structural changes may follow the expression of their needs and agendas, and by always treating everyone with unconditional respect and compassion, whether they may be a Chinese peasant or a World Bank economist.
As to my role in these social movements and the empowerment of the people, to be perfectly honest, I do not necessarily see myself being involved in an organization directly challenging capitalism’s injustices. However, I do plan to work in an environment that indirectly challenges it by addressing issues of inequality and vulnerability through some sort of community organization: rather than organizing unions, working in a therapeutic or educational setting designed to allow people to express themselves, to be heard, and to heal.
Though, as the director of Kenya’s USAID education branch said, organizations often “waste” the majority of their money on the populations hardest to reach rather than targeting accessible and economically productive populations, my desire is to work with marginalized individuals who have been hurt by the modern world and forgotten by the system, whether through trauma due to private histories of domestic and sexual violence, or through more public problems like homelessness, poverty, and warfare. In my mind there are two avenues by which to address the problems present in modernity: attacking the causes of problems or treating the effects. I often feel guilty, as if the only valid way to initiate change is by attempting to directly eliminate structural violence by taking preventative measures and reforming the structure itself, but I also believe that working with the brokenness caused by structural violence is equally important in the battle for its elimination.
Challenging structural violence means addressing both the causes and working with those affected. Naturally, the two are not mutually exclusive; working as an art therapist with street children or teaching confessional writing in a high school for traumatized youth is not a separate task from working with welfare policies or social work. Working for humanitarian change at any level or sector means addressing issues at all levels of every sector, for all are interrelated and interdependent. While I may want to work directly with people in need of healing and love, others may want to work in policy or trade or agriculture to address the issues of structural neglect and suffering found there.
With every paragraph this becomes less of an essay and more of a reflective catalogue of Erin’s dreams for the future, but though I do not necessarily have specific plans to organize collectives of people for the purpose of empowering said populations, I do hope to always live in community. My desire would be to always live cooperatively, on compounds or in shared houses, with a group of people dedicated to spreading love and justice and beauty, whether through art or education or activism or community organization, whether they come from the elite class or the most destitute level of society, whether they come from a Western culture or another. I do not know where or with whom I want to work, although I know that I have never anywhere felt as immediate and deep a connection as I did in Rwanda, Kenya, and Kosovo—but surprisingly enough, I felt nearly the same love for south Yonkers when I began volunteering with Hispanic immigrants down near the projects.
I suppose my answer then is that I desire to work with individuals in need of love and healing, individuals that will compose a society of people finding wholeness and continuing the cycle of service and love they became a part of.
poverty
Understanding the causes of poverty entails first understanding the condition symbolized by the ambiguous word. Dominant in modern discourse is poverty defined as an economic state, as a concrete measurement of income and the adequacy of that income to meet basic needs. Although one component of poverty is certainly the inability to meet basic needs, the term poverty expresses a broader condition: deprivation of agency, power, and freedom. Not only does poverty deprive its victims of their power to house, feed, clothe, and heal themselves, but it also deprives them of control over all aspects of their lives. Earning enough money to live above the poverty threshold in the United States (an income of $10,830 per year) might possibly allow an individual enough food to survive, a room to live in, and minimal healthcare, but such an income certainly restricts his or her ability to engage in intellectual activities, to function as a social individual, to engage in interests and hobbies, and to all leisurely, non-survival pursuits. Rather than being a measurement of physical wellbeing, poverty should be understood to refer to an individual’s socioemotional, spiritual, and mental wellbeing.
In searching for the “cause” of poverty (though the cause should not be assumed to be a singular, essentialist cause but the interaction between a multiplicity of agents) it is imperative to understand poverty as a comparative, rather than an absolute, term. Poverty is visible only when people and their lifestyles are compared: the Bronx versus Manhattan, the descendents of the Mayflower immigrants versus the children of Mexican immigrants, field workers in Louisiana to field workers in Kenya. In the United States, poverty means the inability to afford a flat-screen television while in Nigeria poverty means the inability to afford bread. While in an American family poverty’s effects may be seen in a father’s inability to provide a high-quality education for his son, poverty in an Albanian family may be evident in a father’s inability to take the customary morning tea break with his daughter. Seeing poverty as a comparative term referencing an individual’s inability to assert his will on his circumstances, realizing its inconsistencies of definition even when stretched from one borough of New York to another, begins to crack away at the absolute, linear, factual face it presents.
In order to find the causes of poverty, the mechanisms of structural violence and the roots of vulnerability, one must examine no factor alone, but the nexus of dependent agents in the areas of academia, technology, society, ecology, culture, and politics. The causes of poverty are the factors that make up the entire world system of economics, politics, and culture. Locating these agents and causes demands asking substantive questions: rather than, “Why do some people have low incomes?” ask instead, “Why are they malnourished, sick, and uneducated?” Money is not the cause of poverty, though the questioning its unequal distribution brings us much closer to finding poverty’s roots. In finding those roots, we are forced to confess that as participants in the world system living in relationship with agents, we all partake in the perpetuation of poverty. However, while this revelation may result in guilt, it should also result in freedom: as agents in the system causing poverty around the globe, we are not only agents of perpetuation but agents of liberation. If we collectively and individually are the cause of poverty, then we collectively and individually are the key to finding a true solution.
In searching for the “cause” of poverty (though the cause should not be assumed to be a singular, essentialist cause but the interaction between a multiplicity of agents) it is imperative to understand poverty as a comparative, rather than an absolute, term. Poverty is visible only when people and their lifestyles are compared: the Bronx versus Manhattan, the descendents of the Mayflower immigrants versus the children of Mexican immigrants, field workers in Louisiana to field workers in Kenya. In the United States, poverty means the inability to afford a flat-screen television while in Nigeria poverty means the inability to afford bread. While in an American family poverty’s effects may be seen in a father’s inability to provide a high-quality education for his son, poverty in an Albanian family may be evident in a father’s inability to take the customary morning tea break with his daughter. Seeing poverty as a comparative term referencing an individual’s inability to assert his will on his circumstances, realizing its inconsistencies of definition even when stretched from one borough of New York to another, begins to crack away at the absolute, linear, factual face it presents.
In order to find the causes of poverty, the mechanisms of structural violence and the roots of vulnerability, one must examine no factor alone, but the nexus of dependent agents in the areas of academia, technology, society, ecology, culture, and politics. The causes of poverty are the factors that make up the entire world system of economics, politics, and culture. Locating these agents and causes demands asking substantive questions: rather than, “Why do some people have low incomes?” ask instead, “Why are they malnourished, sick, and uneducated?” Money is not the cause of poverty, though the questioning its unequal distribution brings us much closer to finding poverty’s roots. In finding those roots, we are forced to confess that as participants in the world system living in relationship with agents, we all partake in the perpetuation of poverty. However, while this revelation may result in guilt, it should also result in freedom: as agents in the system causing poverty around the globe, we are not only agents of perpetuation but agents of liberation. If we collectively and individually are the cause of poverty, then we collectively and individually are the key to finding a true solution.
hurricanes and tsunamis
Observing the Katrina and Haiti crises through the lens of a television, the views of the two disasters are nearly identical. Newscasters provide constant stream of images depicting a handful of resident charities handing out food and water, groups of empty-handed foreign aid workers milling about trying to find some avenue by which to help, and a horde of military troops with drawn weapons defending donated supplies against alleged violent looters and deranged rioters. A few stations broadcast stories of homeless families banding together to find shelter or victims gathering food to share. Both in the cases of Katrina and Haiti, however, the media presents the average citizen with gruesome stories featuring heaps of dead bodies, reported by shaken correspondents, and typically concluded with calls for small, satisfying donations through texting or buying from certain brands dedicated to donating their profits.
Both Katrina and Haiti’s stories are tales of poverty and racism, regions weakened by exploitation and neglect and then devastated by natural disaster. The government responses to the two situations continues their similarities: reports of hunger-crazed looters resulted in large-scale military presence to subdue the people by might rather than large-scale aid workers to pacify the people with providing food and water. In addition, both catastrophes have been widely regarded as opportunities for change and growth in the afflicted areas, as opportunities for development. Disaster effectually spells invitation for big businesses and investors, an economy razed and ready to be rebuilt.
Though the faces of Katrina and Haiti as shown on the television appear identical, some glaring yet overlooked differences reveal much about the role of the United States in the disasters of the 21st century. Two blatant differences between the disasters are found in numbers: while the United States donated to date has donated 100 million dollars to Haiti’s crisis, the government spent close to 110 billion dollars on the Katrina disaster. Also, though both Katrina and Haiti were products of poverty, Haiti’s projected death toll is nearly 50 times Katrina’s. In short, though Haiti’s need is greater, the aid provided has been lesser. Though this statement seems initially to be wildly unfair, reflection proves the opposite: it is only logical that the United States would expend more money and energy attending to a problem within its own borders. However, as the US’s role is drawn into question, other concerns arise. If the United States contributions to Haiti are a fraction of what they were during Katrina, why is the US military presence equal greater in Haiti than it was in Katrina? Why is the United States so strictly regulating and restricting relief efforts from other nations and organizations while themselves providing very little other than military might? The US may have had the clear right to organize the Katrina efforts (infamous for their chaotic disorder), but taking control of, and effectively preventing, much of Haiti’s relief does not seem to be a right assigned to the United States. The United States should limit their military generosity to the same level as their aid, if not reducing it much beyond, as well reexamining their role in foreign countries: assistance or authority?
Both Katrina and Haiti’s stories are tales of poverty and racism, regions weakened by exploitation and neglect and then devastated by natural disaster. The government responses to the two situations continues their similarities: reports of hunger-crazed looters resulted in large-scale military presence to subdue the people by might rather than large-scale aid workers to pacify the people with providing food and water. In addition, both catastrophes have been widely regarded as opportunities for change and growth in the afflicted areas, as opportunities for development. Disaster effectually spells invitation for big businesses and investors, an economy razed and ready to be rebuilt.
Though the faces of Katrina and Haiti as shown on the television appear identical, some glaring yet overlooked differences reveal much about the role of the United States in the disasters of the 21st century. Two blatant differences between the disasters are found in numbers: while the United States donated to date has donated 100 million dollars to Haiti’s crisis, the government spent close to 110 billion dollars on the Katrina disaster. Also, though both Katrina and Haiti were products of poverty, Haiti’s projected death toll is nearly 50 times Katrina’s. In short, though Haiti’s need is greater, the aid provided has been lesser. Though this statement seems initially to be wildly unfair, reflection proves the opposite: it is only logical that the United States would expend more money and energy attending to a problem within its own borders. However, as the US’s role is drawn into question, other concerns arise. If the United States contributions to Haiti are a fraction of what they were during Katrina, why is the US military presence equal greater in Haiti than it was in Katrina? Why is the United States so strictly regulating and restricting relief efforts from other nations and organizations while themselves providing very little other than military might? The US may have had the clear right to organize the Katrina efforts (infamous for their chaotic disorder), but taking control of, and effectively preventing, much of Haiti’s relief does not seem to be a right assigned to the United States. The United States should limit their military generosity to the same level as their aid, if not reducing it much beyond, as well reexamining their role in foreign countries: assistance or authority?
structural functionalism
If society does indeed make people what it needs them to be, the obvious following question is this: what is society’s goal? What are the “imperatives society has to pursue” (Peet 140)? If society’s needs are met by the state of its people, the answer lies then in examining what the people are and do. The overwhelming number of people in the United States seem occupied with the buying and selling of commodities, anywhere from Hummers to Hershey’s to Hallmark’s. Somehow the production of items such as massive cars, chocolates, and greeting cards seems to be less urgent than the “imperatives” described by Parsons.
The notion that society is driven forward by needs seems to have little historical support. The most primitive societies of man, such as those of the Kalahari bushmen described by Sahlins in The Post-Developed Reader, have remained static in their development for millennia and yet seem to have very little specialization, roles, or driving imperatives. Toennies attempts to argue away inconvenient examples of societies such as the bushmen’s by dividing societies into two categories: gemeinschaft and gesellschaft, claiming that the first traditional, communal-style society exists in families or neighborhoods (organizations dependent on a greater state), while the second self-serving, driven society extends to the entire independent state or multinational companies. This dismissal of static societies can be dismissed in turn, as traditional societies such as the bushmen are also as self-sustained and independent, or even more so, than the modern nation state. If all independent societies evolved based off of needs, then the modern world would have remained in a primitive state of relative freedom from want, as with the bushmen.
The idea that “people must stick together in societies to survive” seems, as well, to be false (Peet 114), as throughout the ages people have been known to survive alone, whether as hermits, lone hunters, or the ostracized. The only truly imperative mutual dependency is for the purpose of reproduction and the continuation of the human race. If not involved in procreation, man can, in fact, be an island.
The question then remains: what common goal prompts people to form societies and become mutually-dependent in its pursuit? Luxuries. Commodities. Comforts. Massive cars, chocolates, and greeting cards, as well as electricity, running water, packaged food, and entertainment. Society desires ease, leisure, and pleasure, and the less uncomfortable work necessary to attain these, the better. To achieve these ends, the West has forgotten, distorted, or reconstructed the meaning of the word “need” while the developing world lives in squalor to produce its luxuries. This is what society demands and needs to satiate its avarice, hierarchical lounging and labouring classes.
The notion that society is driven forward by needs seems to have little historical support. The most primitive societies of man, such as those of the Kalahari bushmen described by Sahlins in The Post-Developed Reader, have remained static in their development for millennia and yet seem to have very little specialization, roles, or driving imperatives. Toennies attempts to argue away inconvenient examples of societies such as the bushmen’s by dividing societies into two categories: gemeinschaft and gesellschaft, claiming that the first traditional, communal-style society exists in families or neighborhoods (organizations dependent on a greater state), while the second self-serving, driven society extends to the entire independent state or multinational companies. This dismissal of static societies can be dismissed in turn, as traditional societies such as the bushmen are also as self-sustained and independent, or even more so, than the modern nation state. If all independent societies evolved based off of needs, then the modern world would have remained in a primitive state of relative freedom from want, as with the bushmen.
The idea that “people must stick together in societies to survive” seems, as well, to be false (Peet 114), as throughout the ages people have been known to survive alone, whether as hermits, lone hunters, or the ostracized. The only truly imperative mutual dependency is for the purpose of reproduction and the continuation of the human race. If not involved in procreation, man can, in fact, be an island.
The question then remains: what common goal prompts people to form societies and become mutually-dependent in its pursuit? Luxuries. Commodities. Comforts. Massive cars, chocolates, and greeting cards, as well as electricity, running water, packaged food, and entertainment. Society desires ease, leisure, and pleasure, and the less uncomfortable work necessary to attain these, the better. To achieve these ends, the West has forgotten, distorted, or reconstructed the meaning of the word “need” while the developing world lives in squalor to produce its luxuries. This is what society demands and needs to satiate its avarice, hierarchical lounging and labouring classes.
marx
Marx’s contributions to politics, economics, and development have had an undeniably significant impact on the formation of theories in each of these areas. Underlying all of these contributions is a revolutionary philosophy concerning man’s nature and his role in society.
Marx’s ideas concerning human nature stem from the Enlightenment, taking its emphasis on man’s rationality and integrating it with an emphasis on man’s social nature. In addition, Marx adheres to the Enlightenment belief in the perfectibility of man, observing man, like society, transcending his former self over and over again. The process of transformation is made up of the elements of contradiction and instability, a new idea or force, and the synthesis of the two, transcending the original self.
This process is the result of man struggling to extract a livelihood out of nature and continue existence, becoming better and better at both dominating and cultivating the environment in such a way as to reap the most reward. Because it is man’s struggle with the earth that leads to his transformation, science, the means of understanding and subduing the natural world, also holds transformative powers for man.
If science and the natural world are the two forces that form and re-form man, then Marx seems to be putting forth the idea that man is the product of the material world rather than the spiritual or intellectual realms. But Marx also states that man is the source of his own consciousness. These notions create a tension between man as the creator and the natural world as creator, a tension between consciousness and evolution, a power struggle between man and his environment.
This seeming contradiction is the root of Marxist thought. On the one hand, “human nature is created under definite natural and social conditions…and man’s consciousness comes from real-life experience in the physical world” while at the same time, “we think up our ideas and construct our own rationalities” (Peet). In one breath, man is awarded agency and robbed by his environment of his very will and character. We know we exist and have free thought and will because of our ability to act and understand our own actions as reactions to the physical world, but at the same time our initiative is dependent upon having the world as a stage upon which to act, and our thoughts are formed and bound to the conditions into which we were born. Ideas have material origins, meaning that we assimilated the material world into our understanding and created thought around it, but it is the material world that gives our thoughts meaning and not vice versa. In fact, Marx describes our very happiness as being dependent upon materialism and that which we have or have not. This paradox, man’s conscious direction of his own fate coupled with his inability to operate independent of his environment and fellow beings, proves to be more of a balance of ideas than a contradiction, a balance that makes Marxism incredibly attractive.
Marx’s ideas concerning human nature stem from the Enlightenment, taking its emphasis on man’s rationality and integrating it with an emphasis on man’s social nature. In addition, Marx adheres to the Enlightenment belief in the perfectibility of man, observing man, like society, transcending his former self over and over again. The process of transformation is made up of the elements of contradiction and instability, a new idea or force, and the synthesis of the two, transcending the original self.
This process is the result of man struggling to extract a livelihood out of nature and continue existence, becoming better and better at both dominating and cultivating the environment in such a way as to reap the most reward. Because it is man’s struggle with the earth that leads to his transformation, science, the means of understanding and subduing the natural world, also holds transformative powers for man.
If science and the natural world are the two forces that form and re-form man, then Marx seems to be putting forth the idea that man is the product of the material world rather than the spiritual or intellectual realms. But Marx also states that man is the source of his own consciousness. These notions create a tension between man as the creator and the natural world as creator, a tension between consciousness and evolution, a power struggle between man and his environment.
This seeming contradiction is the root of Marxist thought. On the one hand, “human nature is created under definite natural and social conditions…and man’s consciousness comes from real-life experience in the physical world” while at the same time, “we think up our ideas and construct our own rationalities” (Peet). In one breath, man is awarded agency and robbed by his environment of his very will and character. We know we exist and have free thought and will because of our ability to act and understand our own actions as reactions to the physical world, but at the same time our initiative is dependent upon having the world as a stage upon which to act, and our thoughts are formed and bound to the conditions into which we were born. Ideas have material origins, meaning that we assimilated the material world into our understanding and created thought around it, but it is the material world that gives our thoughts meaning and not vice versa. In fact, Marx describes our very happiness as being dependent upon materialism and that which we have or have not. This paradox, man’s conscious direction of his own fate coupled with his inability to operate independent of his environment and fellow beings, proves to be more of a balance of ideas than a contradiction, a balance that makes Marxism incredibly attractive.
long lasting effects
The rise of the African slave trade and European imperialism led to obvious material transformations as well as certain paradigm shifts on both the African and European continents. Both the transformations and the paradigm shift were nothing but symptoms of the disease running rampant across the face of the globe: greed. Though all humans possess an innate sense of greed, the condition is most easily observable in those equipped with the means to express their greed. Europe possessed such means: the slave trade and imperialism were ideal for extracting resources, labour, and capital from Africa. Thus, greed transformed Europe and Africa as it transforms all its victims and their prey: the greedy become wealthy and the defenseless become poorer; the wealthy despise the poor and the poor hate the rich.
The economic transformations of Europe and Africa presented themselves, simply put, as Europe prospering and Africa sinking into poverty. As Edmund Dene Morel observed on the Belgian docks, a steady stream of ships carried expensive commodities such as rubber and ivory to Europe and left empty of any tradable goods (Hochschild 2). Once the international slave trade began to develop, Europe benefited further as its nations found an export market in their African colonies, trading European products for African slaves at an exchange rate hugely in the European’s favour (Wolf 198). Thus, while European economies flourished, Africans rapidly lost control of their economies as the Europeans depleted their resources and depopulated their lands, leaving the African nations impoverished and powerless (Hochschild 13).
Equally as important as the economic transformations, both Europeans and Africans underwent major paradigm shifts in the ways they perceived race. Originally, the Europeans and Africans imagined each other to be supernatural beings such as spirits of the dead, mythical birds, and three-faced one-legged lions (Hochschild 6, 15). After some interaction, the two races very briefly learned to view one another as human beings, trading with one another and discussing religious beliefs together (Hochschild 9). However, as the Europeans came to value objects such as ivory and gold more highly than African lives, the value of an African life became equal to the amount of money that could be extracted by his labour. By the time slave traders referred to little girls as worthless once the girls became to sick to work and politicians referred to their Africa porters as “beasts of burden”, the European paradigm had shifted completely, no longer regarding Africans as humans, but as animals (Hochschild 11, 119). As the Europeans wreaked death upon the African continent, Africans returned to their original conclusion: that the white men were ambassadors of the land of the dead (Hochschild 16). These shifts and changes left Africa and Europe’s economies and mentalities irreversibly transformed.
The economic transformations of Europe and Africa presented themselves, simply put, as Europe prospering and Africa sinking into poverty. As Edmund Dene Morel observed on the Belgian docks, a steady stream of ships carried expensive commodities such as rubber and ivory to Europe and left empty of any tradable goods (Hochschild 2). Once the international slave trade began to develop, Europe benefited further as its nations found an export market in their African colonies, trading European products for African slaves at an exchange rate hugely in the European’s favour (Wolf 198). Thus, while European economies flourished, Africans rapidly lost control of their economies as the Europeans depleted their resources and depopulated their lands, leaving the African nations impoverished and powerless (Hochschild 13).
Equally as important as the economic transformations, both Europeans and Africans underwent major paradigm shifts in the ways they perceived race. Originally, the Europeans and Africans imagined each other to be supernatural beings such as spirits of the dead, mythical birds, and three-faced one-legged lions (Hochschild 6, 15). After some interaction, the two races very briefly learned to view one another as human beings, trading with one another and discussing religious beliefs together (Hochschild 9). However, as the Europeans came to value objects such as ivory and gold more highly than African lives, the value of an African life became equal to the amount of money that could be extracted by his labour. By the time slave traders referred to little girls as worthless once the girls became to sick to work and politicians referred to their Africa porters as “beasts of burden”, the European paradigm had shifted completely, no longer regarding Africans as humans, but as animals (Hochschild 11, 119). As the Europeans wreaked death upon the African continent, Africans returned to their original conclusion: that the white men were ambassadors of the land of the dead (Hochschild 16). These shifts and changes left Africa and Europe’s economies and mentalities irreversibly transformed.
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