spinning

2004

is there a reducible self, apart from the context of a person/place/thing? is it arrogant to imagine so? a subject, divorced from an object, divorced from an other? do we project our own privilege in posing this quest-ion? & is essentialiing a righteous goal? becoming absolute? is this true to reality? ("reality," "identity"; subjectivity).. what relationship exists between this endeavor, & that of "people-pleasing"? are they related? what purpose do they serve to self-hood? & how do we place a value-judgment on this? how do truth and portrayal negotiate roles in identity? and how do they exist together - in opposition? in alignment? in necessary 'balance', or congruence? what scale can 'self-improvement' be founded on with these musings? what beliefs do we have about 'self' that inform the choices we make to live?

unemployed

July 15th, 2004

i imagine she is brown, older, very, very kind. and happy now. smiling. employed.
employed.

i don't know how to experience rejection; i construct myself at the interview, childlike. terribly vague and naive. they can't wait to go. they're wanting to roll their eyes, as i speak about my experience. my young life.
i don't know enough.
the wrong people were rooting for me.
i believed too much in myself.
underinvested.
they were mean, and controlling, and immediately contradicting.

(none of this is true.)

what went wrong? the verdict is not in my favor. the variables are jumbled and distorted. i have no insights about my past.

and how do i confront my own unknowing? i pretend drastic choices. i won't sleep. i'll have no food. i'll take up smoking. throw up a lot. snap pictures of everything. write about everyone who lost something, mostly me. i'll leave the car parked, forever. i'll wear my disillusionment, and guard myself from my life. candid, unrelenting life.
i had too much faith in possibility.


i was sitting with coffee, and karen. she was sensitive, curious, cautiously concerned. she was not sure what i needed. (i resented us both, lacking direction, having distance.) a small gray bird hopped to our table for food. i felt special, and watched it closely. karen tipped an empty cup, and it flew to the next table, startled. the women there did not see that it wanted to be noticed. it did not notice that i wanted to be seen. our encounters are random, self-motivated, unimpressionable. i hate that selfish bird. gray bird. (i loved it until it took me for granted.)

we drive to go car shopping. make plans for the garden. there are fleeting sentences and fused colors in my head; i want to go home. i have no memory of myself. i don't know where i am. (they make me cry.)

and you remind me in a letter i received today of my car payments.
economics is a cultural trap. i fucking hate money.

and i understand hopelessness in one petrifying moment. (i am standing sunburned with a sign at the end of a highway exit. people pass, with varying degrees of sympathy: "can't get work. anything helps. god bless.")

.

joyful tandem

July 15th, 2004

joyful tandem, i have received your scribbles with a letter from another of my past (figures, preceding me). they were opened solidly, in the mood that made them (i presume), a piece of your self's, selves, drawing into me darkly. there is something about distance in this. we are tied together, and alwys away from what we believe to know.
i should know,
not to read your mail in a storm, in a state of perfectly composed Day.
i weigh your differences on my brow, and note (as they say) a coincidence. a collective thought. the face of some existential musing, infusing.
this place is immediate.

.

a level voice

i want to blog about everything. things that are still, things that grow, advertising, grocery stores, what the dog did, how to kill time, startling colors and surfaces and breaths of air, pieces of passing conversations, small adventures, thoughts upon waking, what the earth would say, tiny lies, image and city, the myth of aging, the labor of history, acts of compassion, the light the light the light, the shadows, one stranger, two strangers talking, making breakfast, eating bread, relics of memory, love of course, everywhere there is tension, symbolism, noise, collections to have, questions to voyage, what matters or doesn’t, how to understand.

and on.

and then i realize that i would rather simply write about these things.

there must be one thousand ways to express oneself and one million ways to share. what does it mean to choose blogging? if i were to blog about my life, its details and images and prying amusements, it seems i would be equally suited to shout my reflections to a crowd of strangers, pulsing the end of my speeches with “anyone..?”. people would smile, or shrug, and one may rarely raise a hand, shadowing all my intentions. and everyone would soon disperse, having not stayed long at all, and shuffling, and my body would feel so strange from the toil of everything unmet.
displaced.
mis-fit.

blogging blends anonymity with the impression of celebrity, and some parody of dialogue. is it novel? is it triumphant? is it awkward? is it purely flawed? i wonder between the format and the motive:
? if i write to hear myself think, i may try keeping a diary, and
? if i write to share my meanderings with others, i could draft an email, and
? if i write to illicit feedback, i ought to have a conversation into someone else’s eyes.
blogging may work to represent the voice of a cause, to organize efforts, to unite minds across distance. but as a personal, solitary enterprise, there must be some combination of an author who is otherwise unoccupied, self-regarding, timid, or spectacular, and a reader who is suspiciously available, indulging, or exceedingly devoted.

there are other explanations, of course.
but i wouldn’t buy any of them.

i am not a private person. i don’t keep secrets or fear light or hold fragile keepsakes against my chest. but i keep a level voice, and it matters who i speak to. i don’t distribute mass email updates, and i’m not inclined to send along forwards, and i have never mailed out year-end greeting cards with my summarized life across the reverse side of a photo of my dog. i don’t take three-way phone calls. and i don’t accumulate my poetry for open mic night. and i don’t sing in front of crowds.
and i don’t blog.

but i will write, in this electric journal, in this glaring, pixeled light. that is called a blog. i will paint a space and rest here and nurture it. and i suppose it will be good to imagine that others may be listening, sometime, but there are no fanfares.

and i mean that as a relief.

.

sugar cookies and private kisses.

windows and cages

sun brittled.

closed on saturday.

deciding to leave

Wednesday, November 12, 2008 1:48:02

it is thrilling.


i feel like leaving for mexico is the best idea i have had in so many years. it is a recommitment to what i love, and it serves all sides of me. it will be challenging and poetic and important, and people who don't understand this as an artistic act will value it as an educational exploit nonetheless. and i am okay with that, because it will help me to move creatively in disguise, while hiding nothing, along the lines of power that are already defined. it is my metamorphosis and my manipulation.

and in another way, how could i be a scholarly contributor to the field of literacy reform as a monolingual person? and more importantly, why would i want to be? it doesn’t have to be about pedagogy; this will just happen. it will spill over, an organically integrated form of my heart and mind, at last. i already think bilingually, you see, but i have only one language to speak it. this has been a problem, a way of feeling trapped. perhaps i should speak a hundred languages for the way that i imagine the world.

this is it.

general devastation, which words fail to convey, but oh well.

Monday, November 3, 2008 8:42:54 PM

i spend all of these days outwitting the edge, orbiting the city, leaning from a wind, the incurable point that i am wandering. or swinging. or rocking in one place like an injured child
like the motion inside a cage made of windows
please let the day be over

i am so alone, i will say it plainly. it will not wear the glittery enchantment of images anyway, there is too much apparent. again and again i have isolated myself in a way that has no loyalties, not art, not song, not cynicism,
and i am sorry


i would scratch a hole in my head, pry out the piece that is screaming, hold my breath in the other hand, make two fists, be fiercely still
be nothing

i would confess everything
i would thaw into the floor through my eyes, i would run like a machine, to feel nothing of my bones crashing
i would tower like a god, to see everything around the pain and believe that it is small


what have i done?
(this is the voice that comes out of me)
i don’t know what is joyful
i don’t know what is joyful.


there is nothing trustworthy.

i don’t know who i am, i don’t know what i love. everything is a memory, or a tale. or i faked it. yes, i faked it. i pretended that i had enough or knew enough or was enough to be named in some way, but now i am not named in any way, and i can only see the holes. like outlets. like gulfs.
doesn’t that make sense? won’t you agree, and then i will not be invisible?
and then?

everything goes away.
i have no account of myself at any stage in time. all of my records are crafted, or lost. how is this possible? what will it bear on me? i have gaped at a burning screen of my life, of my love, until everything was white. there has been damage. my sockets bleed clear.


(this is the voice that comes out of me)
what am i going to do
what am i going to do

and other things, like:
oh god

and
there is no one here


i cannot think of what is next. i tremor my knees under tables and swallow so much coffee when my guts are already spilling and watch my own image on glossy surfaces. i wake in the morning with anxiety for dreams. the darkness concerns me. there is only the shadow of obligation. of constancy. devotion plays against time.
you are not reliable.
i am not reliable.

i am imitating versions of a person in a world, but none of it is sincere. bumper stickers have more integrity. i have thought of this.


it is always over.
that's all.


.

coffee and pausing

Wednesday, August 20, 2008 11:41:11 AM

coffee hangs against my veins like this reaching white hue over denver. i am waking slowly to the day, which has not announced itself with the garish sun, or the motion of people with their cars and dogs and duties. i stand at the window yawning my naive severance from the condition of labor, and out of my fondest diligent custom, i turn to musing.

my day is wildly free. i love that word, wild. it is so real and unfamiliar. the opposite of amazing, or fine, or cool, which are excessive and tired and subtly unconvincing. i don’t like words like that.

a family just walked by across the street. (my street.) a large hobbling father with three young sons. the eldest gripped the small hand of his young brother, and the youngest trailed behind with a store bought bunt cake in one shifty hand. i wonder where they could be headed at 10:30 in the morning with a bunt cake, and why they are not in school. the cake could be an offering to a teacher, perhaps, a sugary persuasion to overlook flagrant tardiness. a student once tried that on me with a large milky coffee. i hugged him and asked him to quietly take a seat.
just terrible.

what is it about coffee that urges me to find truce to the world? it could not be all that welcome caffeine, because i feel this sense of repose even before the first mouthful. perhaps i am conditioned to associate the experience of coffee with some pacified setting. wine is also like that, although there is a greater sense of mischief and blitheness.
and sex.

i want to sit with wine and the coy premise of sex, and rise after hours against navy walls and curtains and soft breaths of the fan, devastating plans of early coffee and seated calm. beautiful distractions.

i am idle on my couch again. there are workers coming in and out of cars along the street. (my street.) i should probably step into the shower and finish my (tuesday) errands before reading and class. i must think of class as an adventure and not an obligation, although it is both. yes, it is both, so i am only wildly free until 5:30.

i love our times apart. it is like strolling in a gallery with my hand on my chin, gazing for new surfaces and making up stories. it is the private moments of reflection, when i reach more fully in my affection. people must wonder why i smile as i go.

my giant espresso machine hums and my new necklaces shine primely and my sunflowers swallow water through their green stalking shells.
it is too obvious.


.

men

.


Thursday, June 19, 2008 11:22:25 PM

i was listening to a story today about the lord's resistance army, a self-proclaimed christian guerrilla force in africa known for its brutality and widespread human rights violations. its leader, whose name i do not wish to keep in my head, claims to be the voice of god and the holy spirit and believes his army to be an established theocratic state. the group had initially targeted the ugandan government, but turned on civilians 18 years ago when civil defense militia were sent into villages to protect the communities living there. yes. this war has been going on for more than 18 years. the philosophy behind the rebellion is not clearly understood, other than to establish the ethnic cleansing of non-believers.

aside from murder and mutilation, the army is best known for the mass abduction of children and sexual enslavement, including the prevalent public rape of women in front of their own families and communities. in addition to psychopathic behavior, this is believed to be a political tactic, a warfare weapon, to apply overwhelming humiliation and fear. the children who are stolen from their homes are often forced to kill their own siblings and parents, so that they will never be allowed to return to their villages if they manage to flee from the army's malicious grasp.

i was stuck on these images for some time, and didn't catch what is being done to stop this.




i have to keep my headphones in when i'm biking. i pass by three rescue missions along park avenue twice a day, and there are so many eyes and voices. i will not avoid the crowds; i have to see the people who have been damaged and tossed away, or i will forget them. i will forget their faces and my relationship to their lives. this, of course, is not the same as doing something. i know i am not doing anything to understand them, to help them. when i moved to denver in 2004, i planned to spend a summer interviewing the women waiting in the lines for beds. writing about them, and their childhoods, and the pigeons.

but the men cackle. so many men, punished by life, and dirty, and mean. so many stumbling through the streets, shouting things at me through holes in their teeth, through leathered faces and red glassy eyes. i was naive once, and smiled at them; they thought i wanted something and shocked me with terrible words. i am not brave enough to face this.

when i ride by, i think about their formless eyes on me, their heads turned widely. tracking me. i feel naked every time and wish that i had worn more clothes, or been very ugly. invisible, or feared. i make sure my music is up before crossing 21ts street, so i won't take their foul invitations home with me. so that i don't consume myself with how i should have answered, so i don't feel silenced and used. so that i don't leap from my bike and swing my fists to their flapping mouths. i dream of this, you know.




i don't know what it is, but all of these men have been hitting on me lately. whistling from their cars, singing about me from their counters. telling me their names, asking me mine. smiling with their eyebrows and presumptions and handing me my purchases. slowly. with gratitude.

i am appreciative, i suppose. but so unmoved. there is so much entitlement in men. i fixate on this constantly. the ways they make assumptions, use up space, declare their knowledge and opinions and nearsighted truths. they look at me with the confidence they were born in. and they walk too close to me, and see themselves everywhere, and invite their importance into my thoughts.


it is all so obvious, i know. too obvious. but it festers sometimes when i don't call it out.

and we don't call it out. we let our boys grow into men who feel unrestricted, who impose their presence and demands. sometimes accidentally, and sometimes carelessly, and sometimes with incredible, soulless violence.


i want to know how this happens. i want to know if there will always be the manifestation of a dominant force that is oblivious and hurtful. i want to know how i accept this, and impersonate this, and protest this in my life. i want to know where my power is at all times.




my nephew was born tuesday morning at 8:42 am.

i hope it is more than likely that he will develop great and profound compassion in all of his approaching years, and will not be absorbed instead into society's troubled way of explaining manhood.









.

only moments

.

Friday, June 13, 2008 11:43:31 PM

biking through the city at night is an important urban experience. everything is lit from underneath like a stage and there are pulsing shadows over all of the surfaces that hold me. a perfect metropolitan heartbeat.
i am throwing myself down side by side, racing against wind and life in circles and loaded turns and dwelling in the present moments of a thousand other souls. i gaze into the dioramas of other people’s homes and friday night courtings and gentle walks along the river. i can see everything in a half an hour: the dark anonymity of an unlit block, tired and shifty drifters, the dizzy parting of a long dates, flickering currents and sprinklers awry. moaning bus stations and quiet stoplights and neon signs burning against dark churches and delis and ice cream shops. speeding police cars. one gleaming highway. limp underbellies of every scorched leaf that snubbed the sun. the grass still smells, and the street is still warm, and all of the children have gone to bed.
no twenty yards are the same. everything is hard and then soft again. light, and instantly gone.
this is familiar.
and i am taking all of these images with me so that i can understand why i am like them. i will discover myself, attentive and invisible and longing, and this will be peaceful. if only for a moment.

.

nesting

.

Wednesday, June 11, 2008 8:48:37 AM

it could be the coffee.
and it probably is. but i have this fantastic sense that the day will be rich.

i bought a vacuum cleaner last night, and some things for the kitchen. i'm sure this could be it, too. when i build this home up again, when i force myself to make decisions about who i am in a set of nice knives, or a dark wooden dresser, or a very long and expensive sofa, i will know more about who i am when i leave here. it seems backwards, but it makes sense to me. i am learning how to manifest myself into a physical world. i am nesting.

i have done this before, but it has not been so serious. i was 19, or 23, or inherited everything from someone else and agreed that was what i would look like. and now i have all of these rooms that may never really be mine. and i will fill them joyfully, and not even think about what might happen to all of that money.
why do i think about what might happen to all of that money?

i am going to run to the shower and think about what the bathroom needs, and dress in my bedroom and survey that, too. i am going to leave work early today on a quest for my living room in this city, and i am going to buy a lawn mower online, when i should be taking calls.


and i will replace that fucking hammock.


.

there are a gazillion stories

.

Tuesday, June 10, 2008 10:30:33 PM

all of these people are testing me, all of these people. they visit me in my places and draw me out, asking all kinds of questions. and i have chosen to engage so fully that i worry in every moment i find myself alone. (my own voice amplifies.)

it is good meeting people, and learning new names. having visits. being kind. this is something i love about teaching, and it carries over. i think about winter, when i will take the bus. and i wonder if i will stare straight ahead and lift the corners of my eyebrows. i am good at this: don’t talk to me, i’ll hate you. don’t put your thoughts all over my body, lift your cell phone with pronouncements, lean your bag against my thigh. i think about the men who scrape their heels along the street, staggering for my eyes, splintered by the sun and dark travels. i think about how i have honked and cursed them and never given out a dollar except for once when it was earned. (it has been four years.) i think about the pumping highway. i think about the pigeons.

i think about walking through this life, and every minute, just missing it. i think about my anger and my apathy, my unintention, my fear of experience.

and today was a day that i was not that person. and these days have been like that.

what the hell is going on?

there are a gazillion stories.
and they are just sitting there.
i want to take all the risks, and i want them to be about people. i want to acknowledge their eyes and invite them to share, because i am good at this too. and it feels better. i want to be afraid. i want to displace the order, the expectation. i want to invite myself into this version of me, and i want to stay devoted.

is it possible? is it possible that this is about love? and can i commit to a principle even if it turns? can i be self sacrificing? is this important, or expected? is it necessary? is it the same? i should know what allegiance i will be most attached to, if i am to be intentional.

but i don’t know what the hell is going on.

.

heavy walking

.

Sunday, May 11, 2008 8:25:13 PM

i am raking the grime beneath my fingernails and testing my skin for sunburns. i consider a career amongst nature and wonder if it could be possible to tire of faraway landscapes and tall skies. my toes are sore from stretching against the dusty ribbon of my shoes and my shirt has finally dried loosely on my back. i am resting.

the mountains are littered with shiny hulking cars, and white people gripping walking sticks and taut leashes and the arms of their small children. sometimes i climb off the trail up the steep edges just to feel i am not one of them. there are thorny flowering plants and tiny sunbleached bones and flawlessly cornered rocks here. tsuki zigzags through patches of shade and we act like pioneers.

i love the kind of freedom sun invites.

my hike today was difficult and beautiful and fully symbolic. i knew this when i realized i had forgotten to pack my music. all of my thoughts circled loudly until i spoke them to the scenery like a sermon. the air was quiet and promised to understand.

it isn’t easy, leaving. the act of departure is like digging in a cavern and expecting to find precious things. everything in my life has changed these past months because what i have loved was killing me. have i cherished my own pain? has it grown into me like a root through a steel fence? have i come to expect that my devotions will be strenuous and complicated?

you are complicated. you are a new mystery that is still pure and sincere. but there is a delicate trace of unease, because i have been so surprised. will you disappear? will i need to be rescued? will this be a lesson? and could i bear it?

what is the worth of vulnerability? why do we nod graciously when we must let go? my grandfather loved very little so that he would not be missed at his death, and he accomplished this. i did not mourn him, and i do not remember him. he believed he was cultivating the greatest gift, that we would not have sorrow. i judged him once, but now i reconsider.

and what to do now.. is there something to learn or will i do it again, giving myself over until i cannot recognize who wrote these words? i believe in transcendence but i cannot fathom where i have been. i am guarding against emotion because i sense it will overtake me and be of no use.


i discovered an assembly of thin trees at windy peak that were bare at eye level. sap bled from the exposed bark in perfect fat beads, clear like water but sticky and sheathed. there were clumps of black fur caught in the blonde shards, and i could see the imprint of claws in threes. i wondered if the bear who lived nearby had marked this intentionally so that i would know i was trespassing.

it was time to go home.

there is nothing like this, leaving the mountains. i drive away with grief and renewal, side by side.
and i will go again in days and find stunning rocks to keep and the trails will not mind if i stray.

.

against forgetting

.

Tuesday, April 22, 2008 10:53:00 PM

my gram is a tale of falling in love. she died at 52 from various forms of cancer. her illness was diagnosed when i was in third grade. i remember this because i wrote about “the canswer zapper” (like “answer,” by mistake) in a small, white, hard-cover journal mrs. sutherland (i remember the names of all of my teachers) handed out for free-writing. hard-cover books are special to young people, especially the kind with blank pages that beg for important words. i knew the story had to be about my gram. in awkward cursive along vivid pages, i wrote my best rendition of radiation therapy, which i understood to be a highly technical alien-like gun that shot healing lasers and was very expensive. in the story, my gram had earned the right to receive free treatment from the canswer zapper by the obvious nature of her good will and sheer perfection. immediately, she was healed and lived happily ever after, feeding the ducks and eating raspberry jam on toast past bedtime with her favorite (and only) granddaughter.

of course, the real story ended differently. gram’s health declined quickly. her handwriting in her letters became more and more stilted, and soon she stopped sending them at all. she apologized for this in advance, knowing it was coming. i didn’t understand. my mother had her placed in a nursing home (and later, another) and took me to see her often, not because i missed her (and i did, severely), but because she needed me. i remember these visits with my body. the sapid strawberry hard candies at the front counter, which i hated but always accepted kindly when they were offered upon our every arrival. the palpable smell of the hallways, her room, the oatmeal on her collar. the color of her pajamas in mid-day, the plain aprons on the nurses, the dryness of her mouth from refusing to eat. i remember most gravely the piercing feel of her fingernails in my arms when we hugged goodbye. i always needed help removing them. she could not speak, but i knew what she meant.

my mother would cry in the car, always apologizing. she thought she was putting me through something appalling and unfair, but i believed instead that she finally trusted me. i had a role in all of this. and it was scary, but of course that didn’t matter.

my mom doesn’t like me remembering my gram in this way; it seems morbid and dreadful to her i suppose. but these were the moments that i took care of the people i loved the most. they needed me and i understood this. these memories settled deeper in my mind than all the others. i was only ten.

shortly after gram's passing, my mom had once told me while folding clothes in her bedroom that she could hear her mother, her voice, her guidance, and asked if i had this gift too. i remember the shirt i was wearing then; i stared down at it in disgrace and memorized its fibers. i wanted to say yes. i deserved that kind of magic, but i did not have it. later, i did a research report in school about the six types of ghosts. i thought i had to persuade my gram that i was ready. :)

later in my life, my mother painted a different story of gram. she was a bi-polar alcoholic, the mean kind. sometimes violent and hurtful, and well-known by the police and fire department (apparently there were fires). she refused to attend her own daughter’s wedding and could terrify her children. those who loved her learned her patterns, the signs of doom. avoided her, abandon each other to run away. her husband bought an airplane in secret for fear of her brutal disapproval, and crashed it tragically to his death two months before i was born. my mother also lost two others that year, and feared she would miscarry from intense and uncontrollable mourning. my family attributes my “sensitivity” to the depth of emotion i suffered on my mother’s behalf in utero.

i struggle with the memory of my gram. i know that i have romanticized our time together, and that she remains more of a symbol in my life than a complete character. i feel guilty sometimes, as if i have not been honest with myself about who she was. but i suppose i remember the parts that are useful to me, and that honor her goodness and integrity. i remember that she was an amazing artist, an eccentric, stylish and ahead of her time. she was spiritual and beautiful and daring and very funny. and she loved me more than anything. and that’s my favorite part.

.

falling

.

Sunday, April 20, 2008 1:40:54 PM


water is my favorite natural symbol and teacher. i hesitate to say so, because it is a killer as well. people i know have probably lost loved ones in lakes or oceans or floods. it happens every day. but then, i guess death is a teacher too to those living.

i have leapt from high places just to feel the wind on my face. i have a thing for speed. the adrenaline is fantastic, and the feeling of cutting air is like triumph. i regard the breaking of all barriers with esteem. the sudden change in sound alone from thrashing motion to a sharp placated landing into water invites important thinking. the world turns in an instant, and finally you are fully alert. when else does this happen?

i have heard that still water is like glass from high places. there is some formula for which moment to drop your shoe into the water to break the surface before your body hits. can you imagine? the thinnest layer of liquid binds together at some invisible molecular level. fluid, but defined. i am jealous.

i dream about falling, and water. and gravity. apparently, this is quite common. conventional interpretations associate falling dreams with insecurity, instability, anxiety. i suppose it’s obvious. losing a foothold, grasping in the air, lack of control, all of them “shortfalls”. falling dreams usually occur during the first stage of sleep, which is accompanied by muscle spasms and minor tremors in the body. when bottom hits, we jerk ourselves awake, startled and relieved. it is thought that this is part of an arousal mechanism that allows the sleeper to become instantly defensive to threats in the waking environment. i don’t think of myself as the cautious type, but i won’t rule it out.

i can’t remember the last time i dreamed of flying, but those are my favorite kind.


.

engage, reflect, transform

.

just five days ago on the 28th of november, world renowned french anthropologist claude levi strauss turned an astounding one hundred years old. best known for his ground-breaking contributions to cultural theory and structuralist philosophy, strauss lived with and intimately studied the tribal practices and paradigms of indigenous people throughout many secluded regions of the world. from his first hand experiences and observations, strauss determined that family and community, art and ritual, and magic and mythology are just as important as science or literature in the course of human cognitive development. he further insisted that all people have similar mental structures and ways of reasoning, because all people want to structure the world to make order out of what is ultimately and reducibly chaos. having devoted his life to understanding and exposing new ways of thinking, valuing, believing and doing, levi strauss actively convinced the world that there is no such thing as a primitive or “uncivilized” people, because all people and cultures respond to a lifetime of randomness and instability in essentially the same way.

yes, life is wildly unpredictable, to say the least. in the period of the last twelve months, i have been diagnosed with epilepsy, quit my teaching job mid-semester, ended a committed relationship, bought a house, and fallen in love with an older woman, vinyasa yoga, and the spontaneous scheme of moving out of the country for as long as i can last. when i examine my recent past for indications that such significant changes were ever imminently looming, i come up with only a staggering sense of surprise, and a cautious surrender to the course of my apparently wandering life. the past is an amalgamated story, and the future is a screaming secret, and the present is just noticing, to any varying degree.

this is the stuff of final reflections. restless to assimilate meaning from the variable pieces of my life, recalling my studies in linguistically diverse education has become no casual endeavor. i review the passing semester with scrupulous and desperate care, considering what i have learned, how it has changed me, and what i may keep as i revise and expand my personal and professional identities. as i evolve.

immediately, i confess it is likely that i won’t remember what i was supposed to. i won’t remember a thousand practical teaching strategies for advancing the literacy development of young people. i won’t remember the endless list of educational researchers and theorists who are responsible for so many critical contributions to the field of literacy acquisition. i won’t remember the pure and eager world of School as it was presented through collections of neatly sequenced chapters in unproblematic texts. i simply don’t learn in this way. it is not my world.

but i will remember what awakened me. i recall carol lee fondly, who thrilled me with her insistence that students whose discourse patterns differ from the dominant, formal register of mainstream school are indeed employing intricately structured and highly complex language forms, which have great and untapped merit. i appreciate james baldwin, who suggested that heteroglossia is an invariable form of interaction in classroom settings by which significant student knowledge is exposed, and that teachers should try listening to what students are saying if we expect to penetrate their worlds with “curriculum”. brian cambourne reminded me that although i should not presume to control, command or even necessarily manage the delicate and dynamic learning process, i can establish conditions that make powerful learning possible. i reflect on kylene beers’ nostalgic and emotional letters to her former struggling student, george, and welcome her defense of literacy as a transactional, aesthetic, critical, and social process. and i especially cherish jean lave’s explanation of learning as apprenticeship, and her analysis of how teaching instruction and formal schooling may impede the human learning process in its natural, socially situated unfolding. lave taught me that it is possible –indeed vital– to reimagine School in the interest of real learning that aligns with students’ sense of Self, and extends to and transforms the cultural practices of their lives.

finally, and to a greater degree and sense of gratitude and than i can commit to any aforementioned authors or their assorted conceptions of “good” teaching and learning, i will remember the mentorship of phill(ip) white. in our first class together, phillip witnessed me defy conceptions of educational research, scientific knowledge, and schooling, and was not startled. he saw my besieged inner dialectic, and challenged me to consider whether my ideals were grounded in “a disciplined body of knowledge, or some vague sense of anti-intellectualism”. admitting that both were true, i remembered how much i had to learn, and sought phillip out with overzealous dedication. by his willingness to engage, phillip supported me to discover my own contradictions, develop my first mantra (the title of this post), and locate other educators who are thinking and writing about philosophies i am most attached to and struggle around as a teacher and learner. through our talks, i was able to locate myself in these difficult months by seeing that my questions and sense of fragmentation do not prove that i am lost along some extraneous fringe of master teaching, as i suspected, but at the essential heart. this is the kind of contemplative, relational and powerful learning that i believe matters, and the kind of teacher i aspire to be.

as lave maintained, learning is concerned with shifts in our very identities, and is socially situated in the “fundamental project of life”. against my early suspicion, i have grown this semester in ways that were not dominated by the voices of children, marked by the self-importance of grades, or bound by the feigned mantle of solid classroom walls. my learning is shaped by reflection, which may be the very kind of ritual and art that levi strauss insists, after one hundred years of sharpened noticing, keeps us grounded in living.

moving day

.
it is possible that this weather is just a mean drug. gray, beaming, blotting out trees and roads and signs of changing air and time. hissing, and plain. not like light or canvas, but bleaching and concrete and flat to the eye, with no interesting qualities. unnamable, unworthy.

it is possible that my period is gripping me inside like a chemical pressure, like falling towards the center of the earth below my aching heels, like the kind of sadness that startles. my own reflection in a black swamp. lead blankets and nostalgia of the missing and shallow breath.

and it is possible that the verge of this city grinds my private frailty, where corroding warehouses look like prisons and identical municipal buildings look like prisons and factories pumping thermoglass and serum look like prisons. and lumps of splintered curb pull off the sidewalk and sink dimly to gravelly puddles.

it is possible that moving is like tearing, like the vanishing of memories and love, the vanishing of certainty and association, the vanishing of home. like disappearing, like parting with a wistful or resented or indifferent name. like asking who was i and where am i now and how could it matter? how did it matter? it is gone.

yes. it is possible that i have traveled alone all my life, and lonely, and have wished my own abstraction from anything to believe in. i got myself into this, somehow.


it's just that it is really, especially shitty outside, and i am hormonally and physically unwell, and the city is not the proper place for me, and i moved myself into three spaces today. and one of them is borrowed, and one of them is a padlocked cave, and one of them is bare to the last fine layer of dust and echoes my toes on the floor.


i may be preordained for dislocation.

.