Winter Dryad

Farewell

2011-03-10T00:17:00.000-08:00

This was fun, but I needed a change of pace. If you'd like, find me on tumblr.

is the better part of valor

2010-08-16T07:11:00.000-07:00

I have slowly learned discretion. It has seeped into me like radio silence, it hums at me, muffling words. Not in my head, but in the auralscape around me. I find this makes some people less inclined to trust me, and some people more inclined to tell me things I didn't need to know. Certainly some take this silence for inattention, boredom, judgment. And sometimes it does shelter those very things. But much of the time, it is beause I have realized there are no answers to the things people will want to say to you. There are no answers to other people's foolishness or passion or anxiety. It's easier to listen than to try and comfort, and perhaps it is more comforting.

I didn't understand discretion, a year ago, maybe more. I didn't understand that it is sometimes better not to say anything at all. My tongue, clicking against my teeth, found ruptures in the social fabric and stretched them. It stretched them until it broke. I have stretched words until they lost their meaning, until they were sounds embodying feelings embodying frustrations and loss.

But in this year while I have been learning the goodness of a stilled tongue, I have been called many things. Chief among them has been the word cold. But my downturned eyes and cocked head, pointed as if listening to something else, is actually considering the very thing you have said. I have found smiles more slow to reach, and humor more ironic than passionate in this last year.

Chiefly it's been disappointment after disappointment. I know I'm a pessimist, but the more I talk to people, the more a certain sort of pettiness begins to set my teeth on edge. Three times has my current roommate (in a study abroad) brought up in ire the mosque being built near the site of 9/11. Yes, her uncle and his employees were killed in the event, but her very skittishness at visiting a mosque (as we're doing tomorrow) and her entire anti-Muslim sentiment, along with her tendency to judge people on the littlest things, has gotten me less and less willing to communicate with her. I respect her grief and even cannot challenge her dislike, but her pure prejudice--that is, her blindness--will be nails on a blackboard to me.

Part of the reason is, I have been more willing to have my mind, my opinions changed recently. I have been more open to the fears and the reasoned discussions of others. This has come with that humming silence that descended on me with little warning. But with it has also arrived, in the form of a parasite clinging to its back, an absolute intolerance for those who are casually and consciously cruel to people they barely know.

Everyone is casually cruel at some point or another, it's true. But some people are almost universally cruel. Perhaps I was one of these people. Sometimes I think I was, and sometimes I think I never got to that point. But there are very few people whom I absolutely refuse to have my mind changed about, and if I do it is out of a sense of self-preservation, not of malice. These are people who had personally and deliberately wounded me, not people I could talk to, and especially not people I have not met.

Nonetheless, the sense of loneliness persists, because the kind and good are few and far between. And it is because of this that my lips have tightened, and the same words that used to pour relentlessly from my throat have begin to dissipate behind my teeth.

tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow

2010-06-24T15:55:00.000-07:00

Somehow, within the last six to nine months, I've given up on pop culture.

I don't know any of the new artists, haven't heard any of the new songs, haven't seen any of the new movies. I haven't even gone back to watch the old ones. Glee is a mystery, MIA anathema, and the World Cup absurdity.

Which makes maintaining this nibbling little blog ever the more difficult.

In all these past few years, I've been attempting transformations I'm too little to accomplish, under a paradigm that's becoming more and more irrelevant to me. Desiring newer horizons, taller perspectives, keener scopes, I've aimed for becoming like idols who stand at a blurred distance, recognizable only by their daunting qualities of gentleness, mercy, competence. But in the last year, with time away from the family and encountering genres of people who engage in peculiar patterns of relation, I gave up trying to be other people, and worked on just being me.

I realized, I'm boring.

These days, moved back home, my grandfather passed and my father overseas, my sister too small to see sense and my brother too listless to listen, I've done things I've never wanted to do. I've sopped up urine and organized dinners and found it my job every day to drive the children around in the minivan, feeding and washing and clothing. And I've made worksheets and weeded gardens and I've been feeling older than my years.

Walls of glass have crystallized my view of people my age. "Feeling my age" has been a slippery thing since childhood, but my condition now seems to be completely different. In the penultimate days of my 18th year, I feel other teenagers I know are so much more carefree, spending their days in whirlwind romances and hangouts and adventures. Their conflicts and their desires, which I used to so love to watch and urge on, sound like the alien jabberings of the already dead. Or perhaps that part of me is already dead, and can't recognize "life" when it sees it.

To put an emphasis on human agency seems to me to be a ridiculous thing. Do we really "choose" what we do? Or do what we're compelled to do and come up with rationalizations afterward? I doubt my fragile nest of bones and sinew houses an individual evaluating and making "rational" decisions as to future actions. I have desires and aversions that spring from both emotion and thought, but these aren't processed objectively, independent of the world around me, for whence do these desires and aversions stem but the system I reside in?

That's not to say we don't have intentions. But we are not the only intentions shaping the world.

I've been reading Deleuze and Guattari, you see, and feeling the weight of the entirety of the past (the virtual) hovering over me. And who am I but pure desire and a Body?

Humor is the trait I admire the most now. Humor, and good humor. It's easy to be clever, said someone wise, but so hard to be kind. Being clever, that's a gift. Being kind is a goal.

Alejandro: Alterior Relations

2010-06-09T00:46:00.000-07:00

This is a response to here.

In Gaga's new video, the set of relations that comprise Gaga and the blatantly masculine, homosocial back-up dancers is highly referential, but not knowing the context of where she might have drawn a lot of her ideas, I want to just discuss it as it appears, on the most literal level. This is without reference to Madonna, fascism, etc. I think reading the video in terms of DADT is also not doing it a service; it may be about that, but to do that much extrapolation takes our attention away from what's actually happening, down to the level of mechanics between camera and dancer, Gaga and the men, in the piece.

Instead, Alejandro is, as it always is, about Gaga as artist and art object.

Gaga: technocrat, dominatrix, nun, abject body, ice queen. She is the only blond in a sea of black-headed men, the only woman, the only one with a voice. She is the odd one out; we jump back and forth from understanding it’s her gaze, her perspective, that counts—either through the emphasis of her seeing ability (the spectacles) or through the camera’s adoption of her perspective—and observing her in her various guises, dancing with the boys.

Again, the posedness, the almost artificially prominent bodies of the dancers, whose moves are as deliberate as Gaga’s; they are self-consciously unnatural in order to defamiliarize the viewer with their body formation (is it too gauche to say body-expression?).

The video has gotten publicity for Gaga stating that it is about her frustration for never being loved by the loyal gay men she knows. But it would be too easy to call Gaga the perpetual outsider, looking in, that this is about unrequited affection and rejection.

Gaga may be the odd one out, but she participates; the video highlights her inversion of traditional gendered positions. She possesses the traditionally male role of the viewer, the one whose desires shape the performance of the dancer. She observes the man writhing on top of her; he sits astride her, riding her perhaps in slightly altered (alterior?) performance; they are blatantly switched in perspective and accordingly nonreproductive in position. The very self-consciousness of the sexual performances, and the fact that they are on grey prison beds, suggests that the homosociality which Gaga’s video appears to be displaying (in simultaneous celebration and lament) is a put on, entirely a spectacle.

And here’s where my interpretation gets kinda crazy. Take it as you will.

The alternate homosociality and singular (self-flagellating) sexualities of the men belie the fact that these don’t exist but for Gaga’s viewing them, or Gaga’s view of them. But Gaga simultaneously doesn’t exist as she is in this video without them, because she is constant reaction toward, standing against; they are the ones propelling her skyward. In their black and blue-grey midst, she is the crimson and albino queen, the spot of homogenous white light.* To watch the beautifully choreographed dancers circle around Gaga, making her the center, one realizes she is the “heart” in her white and red... but an at-times sexless heart, her body appearing androgynous and slyly covered by crosses.

The homogenous “gays”—take this with a grain of salt, I don’t think they even have to be read as gay to qualify as Gaga’s army of Others—are those with whom Gaga’s body rejects reproductivity in terms of both a) children and b) dominant heteronormative bodily/sexual relations. These men are not representing relationships she wish she were having. The plurality of men supporting her, tossing her around, passing her back and forth, creates an alterior set of relations that is moving in and out of subjectivity: her relation to them is constantly deterritorialized and reterritorialized. Her subject position isn’t king, despite what the video appears to tell us, because of Gaga’s very ambiguous but real reliance on being the one desiring object within the crowd.

Gaga is simultaneously the narrating one and the one created by her narration; her body’s actions do not correspond with her narrative.

This why those beads go backward into her mouth, her orifice. As the desiring abstinent nun, her voice isn’t stopped up. It provides the soundtrack to the entire spectacle. But there’s a disjunct of her voice/her singing and her body. It’d be too easy to read this imagery as some sort of “regressive state” or “swallowing her words,” but I do think it’s important that she’s incorporating Christian/religious symbolism in her “body” [of work?].

To read this as a text about “teh gays” misses the point for me. Yes, it’s about homosociality and gendered relations, but it certainly isn’t about gender relations and homosexuality.

I still haven’t figured out what the riot stuff is about though. But I don’t think it’s supposed to point directly at Stonewall. So there.

*There is a whole other reading here of the fascist/Weimar Germany undertones and Gaga’s pure-whiteness.

reasons for silence

2009-12-04T23:40:00.000-08:00

-Some days when there's been too much imbibed, one sifts through the world internally. I don't have analysis for some parts of my life.

-But something I've realized is that I'm not exactly cut out for an advocate life. For advocation, yes, but I lack the cuttingness to pursue an argument to its inevitable close, and I don't know how to elegantly end a conversation in which someone else has resorted to rude snarking to reduce my point to apparent ridiculousness.

-Mostly because sometimes I don't even care what the other person thinks. I care what I think. I care that I'm right.

-And some viewpoints are too far away to be converted--in doing so, I'm acknowledging that in a specific instance or "time-slice" (it sucks, dating an analytic philosopher) to provide a node of a binary argument is not enough--will lead nowhere. Sideways action is not only easier (though harder to grasp) than headlong rushing, it is also more effective. They don't have to be wrong, so much as unsettled, unrooted.

-But the question preying on me recently is: is it more worthwhile to immerse myself in the theoretical-practical world, or actually produce? I've had an itch to write for a while, which has preyed at the back of my mind like a sharp tingling, a constant hemming.

See here

2009-10-13T20:16:00.000-07:00

"The role of the book fair is not to be political, it is to listen to other cultures,” he said. “We provide a stage, a platform for discussion."

To listen to other cultures IS a political act.

one last thing

2009-09-06T03:43:00.000-07:00

Uh-oh. My cohorts and I need to go into hiding.

Hi Kids

2009-09-06T03:24:00.000-07:00

I'm not back in the blogosphere. Just pretending to be. Wanted to give a Public Service Announcement:

Just because it's a big book with a big name doesn't mean you should read it. Seriously. The author was unhinged, used too many words to hammer home the same old ideas, and in the end really did not understand the zeitgeist of the future.

ATLAS SHRUGGED AND RANDIAN OBJECTIVISM IS OBSOLETE. Our economy is different, the way responsibility is divided is different, the way capitalism and socialism works is different from Rand's stubborn view of the past. And it's not even good literature. There's absolutely no point in reading Rand.

If you have to know what goes on... sparknotes it. Seriously. Take this from someone who read it at fourteen without knowing how much she was wasting her time. There's no point. Read Charles Stross instead.

Concentration/Distraction Blues

2009-08-05T00:56:00.000-07:00

Holy mackerel, but I am exhausted. Thus the reason for the lack of posting lately. I've been working on a review of the newish movie "Moon" over in my new review blog, but even though I started a week ago I still haven't found time to finish it. Mostly this is because in the past weeks not only has my social life reared it's rather sly, if fuzzy head, my family life has undergone a major change. With the new structure in place, my eyes and hands are suddenly required to "make it work." In fact, I've just spent about an hour washing dishes and putting them away while the rest of the house is asleep. And that's what spawned this post.

The domestic duties I have (in part) taken up have not just been dishwashing (that's rather rare, actually), but also cooking, which I enjoy, and babysitting, which happens far more often than I would like. My youngest sibling is almost three years old--I was already practically grown when she was born. Since both my parents profess they are busy busy busy, the sitting has fallen to me.

When I say sitting, of course, I mean standing, or carrying, or grasping, or wrestling, or running away, when the going gets really tough. "But Zee! She's only Three!" Well, she are pretty Terrible at this age.

Today, I took a shower and did my hair, which requires a lot of care because of its consistency. After coming out and reading books to my sister, I started down the stairs. Except she wanted a piggyback ride. As she got on my back, head four inches from my hair, she let out a humungous sneeze. Mucus went flying. Straight into my newly coiffed locks.

So, once again, I had to wash. Meanwhile, she stole into my room (as she does most mornings) and, when my brother tried to get her out, knowing how much my room is my santuary, she threw my hardback journals at him. That's thirty dollars flying across the room. Aggravated screams thrown in, free of charge.

So ten minutes later when I come downstairs, I distract them from my room by telling them I would have breakfast. I poured them apple juice and then started peeling a hardboiled egg for myself, as they had already been fed by my parents. My sister saw it and demanded it. So I ate the yolk, which she hates, and gave her the egg white. Then I peeled the second and last egg, and as I was about to eat it, she cocks her head and tells me imperiously, "That's for Brother."

My brother doesn't want it.

But it's still for Brother.

Oh, brother.

I manage to trick her into thinking Brother was eating it while redirecting the eggy goodness into my own mouth, only to hear just as I was about to eat the second half of the egg white that Terrible "wants it."

And, so, there went the rest of my breakfast, into my tiny sister's lovely stomach.

What did this have to do with culture, power, existence, experience? Oh, well, um, everything.*

As radicals proclaim, the personal is political.

As a womanist/feminist, one of the issues that interest me revolve around the personal impact that women's work has on the family and how it remains, for the most part, unpaid labor. My mother knows how difficult it is to take care of my sister. She's done it herself. My sister is perpetually imperious (as are most women in my family), casually cruel, easily distracted, and unbearably contrary. The day before, I was rinsing rice, and she insisted on standing on a chair behind me and reaching her hand into the rice to rinse with me. But the task of watching her is also impossibly boring. Not only must she take the helm on everything, she must crawl over you to do so. If you want to read a book to her, she will flip the pages before you're done with the first sentence. If you want to spend time sketching, she will grab the pencil and tear the paper away from you. Fourteen hours a day, seven days a week. So sitting her basically involves doing nothing, or just enough to engage her so that she doesn't stick a fork into the outlet.

This work is mind-numbing, truly.

And yet, I enjoy cooking and washing dishes.

This is because cooking engages your creative faculties. After you know the recipe well enough to try foraging out on your own, for example, you might up the ante by adding a little more chili pepper, or you might tango a little more with adding fruit into random salads. I once tried mandarin oranges with edamame and corn. It wasn't too awful, though I could probably do better with crisp, cubed apples.

If cooking is an active function, then dishwashing is (mostly) a passive one. You scrub the crusty bits and soap the greasy bits. Easy-peasy. And it gives your mind time to wander. In that hour I spent at the sink I came up with more connections regarding "women's work," efficiency, the nature of reflection, and why people might enjoy the Bourne movies than I ever had time for. Dishwashing gives you time to relax and put the body on autopilot, keeping the hum of thinking about the dishes to a minimum while letting your imagination wander. And the connections made are strange, jagged, and sometimes brilliant.

In the lifestyle that I had previously, there was no time to let the imagination boogie. Even though I perhaps had more free time, I spent more of it reading feeds, for example, or doing research, or making up lists and crossing out items on the list, than I did just chilling. And even when I chilled, most of the time I slept. But the brain on "tired-drive" does something else entirely. It pushes through the stupor into brief shards of clarity. Yes, I was tired at the sink. I'm tired now, thus far into this blog post. Yet because I stood and my body fell into a process that was simple, my mind had to entertain itself with other matters.

And one of them was this observation: the character of Jason Bourne in the Bourne movies is one of redemption. As an amnesiac killer who doesn't realize his sociopathic past, who kills 'terrorists' blindly on command, and yet who fights against the establishment which wants him back/dead and in the meanwhile finds some peace of mind in his actions... American society seems to be easing their own conscience about engaging in war with an eternally international Other, the Russian diplomat, the African assassin, what have you. Perhaps the success of the grit and shaky camera aesthetic of the movies has mainly to do with their professions of realism.

Americans had lived for a long time in the shadow of Bond's fantasy world, the British secret agent who drank martinis and wooed women. Bourne stumbles into a loving relationship, fighting constantly and desperately not only to survive, but to gain peace of mind. Perhaps our fondness of Bourne is our own indulgence of our sense of guilt, which woos us into thinking that our society's position is still righteous, and will be taken care of as long as the right authorities are put into place.

But it isn't really the right authorities that matter, but the right principles, the right reform, the right policy.

You may argue that the person behind the policy is essential. In many cases, s/he is. But every person must walk a diplomatic line. There are primal egos positioned like Scylla and Charbydis holding court in government. Compromise is necessary for people. And persons must put policies into effect, or else they don't exist.

But one person does not hold all the answers. (That's the myth of The Dark Knight--which you should watch if you haven't already.) And that's perfectly acceptable.

To circle it back to reflection, I do believe that our current social structure makes it hard for us to think. Either work is mind-numbing, or it's attention-consuming. Very rarely do we encounter situations where we are both rewarded by results of our process and disengaged from the process enough that our synapses may make unexpected snaps. Even if one person lives a well-considered life filled with slow looking and good food, the rest of us power through our days on hyperdrive. And it's exhausting. We're always tired. Either tired, or fine.

Never brilliant. Well, maybe occasionally brilliant.

But occasionally doesn't seem to be quite good enough.

-------------

*Though I admit, I really wanted to complain.

Also, I promise I'll get to the second part of Modern Sensations!, particularly with a close reading of the movie Trainspotting.

New, Modern Sensations! Part I

2009-07-03T22:38:00.000-07:00

I've decided to scale back my feed reading, sadly enough (just kidding, it must be a relief to those of you reading my shared items).

Going: Shakesville, F-Word, Knowledge and Experience, Lingwe

Staying: Womanist Musings, Harpyness, Pandagon, Second Awakening

The reason why is simple: reading all these feeds demands a huge chunk of my time. It was bootcamp, in a way, for thinking about race issues (which in the past I found much less compelling than gender issues) as well as further engagement in politics. But recently I've hit a milestone birthday, and found that some of the time I spend receiving and processing information could be better spent doing other things--in particular, writing.

Thus, I'm taking off a few of the time sucks to streamline my reading and give myself opportunity to concentrate on producing. Over the course of the past few months, these feeds have made a considerable difference, particularly as points around which gravitate conversations about racism, sexism, ableism, and the like. But I find that in dwelling on the particular I miss engaging in general theory and taking larger steps in terms of writing provocative analysis.

It is common wisdom that we live in an age of distraction. Very often this is framed as an argument against multitasking and dividing one's attention between different media which capture our attention. A tension exists between the passivity of a viewer plugged into multiple sensory stimuli and the opposite agency of a competent juggler of tasks and goals keeping many balls in the air at one time. When I read feeds on the computer, for example, I always have a chat window open and music playing.

But distraction manifests another facet, which is in phantasmagoria. I first encountered this concept in an essay by Susan Buck-Morss which I'm reading for my summer course on Walter Benjamin's artwork essay. Phantasmagoria is like fantasy--it's a pervasive overload of stimulation which tricks the human senses through technical manipulation, hiding the process by which an "fantastic" effect happens in order to simulate an environment that is not only totally controlled, but a sensory overload. It isn't just the number of things we juggle, that is, but the strength of our absorption by them, and the fact that they are illusory.She writes:

Phantasmagorias are a technoaesthetics. The perceptions they provide are "real" enough--their impact on the senses and nerves is still "natural" from a neurophysical point of view. But their social function is in each case compensatory. The goal is manipulation of the synaesthetic system by control of environmental stimuli. It has the effect of anaesthetizing the organism, not through numbing, but through flooding the senses.... Sensory addiction to a compensatory reality becomes a mean of social control.

In such a way are time-sucks like WoW compensatory realities, and mechanisms by which a population is rendered passive in the real world, as their energies are internalized and closed to the environment around them in stupors brought on by video-games. Likewise, the amount of time I spend reading and digesting feeds creates a reality in which I am numbed to, say, the sensation of eating dinner because when I do both at the same time (as I am wont to do) the eating is an automatic reflex.

While I wouldn't go so far as to say that reading feeds is phantasmogoric in the same way (it's not a sensual experience), it has the same effect of placing the subject in a closed state of reception. That is, we are led to be distracted from the "natural" impulses of the body, the primal urges, into a directed absorption of something that is highly stimulating, and thus, numbing.

I want to go on to talk about the modern preoccupation with stimuli of a certain sort--the chemical sort. I don't have the biological background, of course, though I do have some idea how chemicals work in a neurological sense through an introductory psych course I took a while back. I want to talk about, in particular, addiction to sensations. Heroin addiction in movies, or addiction to consumerism, or the like. I want to try to assemble an answer to the question: what is the modern condition, besides one of contradiction and parataxis? What is the human experiencing in modernity?

Mythic Figures and Faith

2009-06-21T01:01:00.000-07:00

A while ago, there was a blow-up over in Shakesville.

No, you don't need to look at the links, unless after this thought you feel the need to look over and understand the situation more deeply. Here's a summary of the situation:

Melissa McEwan is the leader of the community at Shakesville, the original blogger who expanded her blog into a thriving community of outspoken feminists and allies who daily grapple with news items, joy and pain, and activism in "teaspoon" increments, with a mantra that goes, we expect MORE. I love the blog; Melissa is a witty writer, and concerned about making the place safe for everyone. Like most leaders, her presence has a certain charisma; people latch onto her, project their desires and fears onto her, mythologize the human into something like a god, and in the process, objectify her.

This sort of demand on her person, however, is exhausting. According to Melissa and those she blogs with, since the blog has become a community it has been harder to moderate and make sure that she herself is protected from triggers, that everyone can have a safe place at Shakesville--though you cannot deny that it is impossible for a safe place for everyone to exist.

You can see this in the following excerpt from the first link I've posted. In it, the guest bloggers over at Shakesville are explaining why Melissa took time off from the site and why there was a freeze on the posts being made in order to respect her decision and make sense of it.

We share Melissa's anger -- a response that we see as completely reasonable in light of the situation, and its history of recurrence. We have profound respect for the fact that she has transcended and transformed that anger over and over, in the face of a community which seems always to expect and demand more and more of her. We believe that her fortitude and determination in this is as remarkable as the expectation that she should have to do so is unreasonable.

As important as it is to us to support Melissa as a human being who we love and honor, we also hold that the work of dismantling and ending of this pattern is a feminist act with implications that extend beyond the situation of a single individual, or even this particular blog community. We believe that this pattern is rooted in variety of sexist/misogynist memes and socio-cultural entrainments which are anti-thetical to the purpose and intent of a Feminist blog, including:
The devaluation of the voices and work of women, and the minimization or dismissal of their concerns.
The expectation of women to be "of service" without expecting much/anything in return -- not even the most rudimentary forms of respect or consideration.
The tendency of those raised in a misogynist culture to project "mommy" issues onto a woman who assumes a role of leadership and power, expecting her to coddle/nurture them to the exclusion of her own welfare while simultaneously ignoring, rebelling against, or resenting her when she exercises her duly-earned power and authority.
The dissociation culture of internet communication where it is easy to vent in virtual anonymity and believe that it has no effect on real people.
The "someone else will do it" attitude that so hinders the evolution of sustainable communities, and which we believe often stems from unearned and unexamined privilege.

We understand that people often act and react from these entrainments, without having a direct intent to harm or hurt. We understand that this can feed into a dynamic where non-contributor commenters expect more of the contributors or founder than they do of themselves in terms of sensitivity and accountability. However, we are equally clear that Shakesville is a place where we want to confront and transform these dysfunctional behaviors.

We believe that, in order to create the changes we want to see in the wider world, we must be willing to behave within our community of choice in ways that demonstrate those changes. Participating in a community where everyone is safe except the person whose vision, energy, and direction created that community is simply unacceptable to us.

And while thinking about this, I made an altogether too obvious connection.

In the last few years I have been active in a vibrant community of my own at my university. It's a center for young scholars, basically kids with oversized brains (and egos to match) who need their own safe place in the expansive U to go when things get tough. Much of the culture of this center pivoted around the adult figures as well as the students. For a long time, there was Dr. Sass, who headed the program as director. She was a trained psychologist with her own issues to handle, but was always there to provide psychological guidance for those in need. She left just over a year ago to pursue other research.

This year brought with it another blow to the culture of this center. Dr. Sweet, associate director of the center, who had been leading the young scholars' program for many years resigned.

I worked closely with Dr. Sweet this last year as T.A. for the English courses certain young scholars must take to reach University level writing. I cannot begin to sing her praises enough; what this professor meant to the community, honestly, cannot be measured out in words. She was leader, mother, teacher, friend, mentor, fellow. She was, as some of us put it, "Dr. S." That title encapsulated her mythos.

Tonight, at the party celebrating the end of this era and the advent of the next, the epiphany which started during the Shakesville drama came into full blossom.

Catsmeat, my good friend, was the first to give a speech about Dr. S. He told her--and those of her friends who knew only other areas of her life--that she was not just an amazing person, but that she was a legend. There were legends about her. "We tell stories about you," he said, "because they are stories about the community as a whole, about who we are. You are our sun-god, our water princess, our... I don't know." That's when I realized that Dr. S the title was an extenuation of that myth.

For the longest time after we graduated from her English class, she would sign her emails with her first name, hoping we would call her that. And we never did. We always called her Dr. S, shying away from the name as if it were sacrilege. (It was.) Her name was a transgression of certain boundaries. It did not fit in with the idol we'd resurrected.

I'll admit, I was part of this mythologizing of her. A large part. I am a myth-spinner, a storyteller galore. And I fell madly for Dr. S when I first met her, and continued to esteem her to the point of rabid love. While this isn't quite the same for most of my community, we all felt uncomfortable thinking of her as other than the blessed, humble leader of our community. She was its heart--but due to reasons beyond our control, she can be that no longer.

Her position of nurturer and listener fed into a second one, as wellspring and pinnacle of our hopes and tendencies to glorify the kind zen. That, I saw now, was unsustainable. Not because she didn't deserve it, for she does, but, as the section I quoted indicates, such a role becomes taxing to the person who must bear it. It is painful when those you love cannot see you fully for who you are, cannot treat you as a friend instead of a legend. The center was a safe space for us--because she made it so, and yet in our eagerness to celebrate her we sometimes did not pay attention to her voice.

The legends we told about her, sometimes hurt her.

Dr. Sweet, we always laughed, had this way of making us feel guilty, because we knew she expected better from us. None of this was her making the students feel guilty, only the student's well-internalized personal desire to "do our best" coming to the fore. And yet, in the final festivities, the stories about Dr. S's ability to make guilt twist our stomaches came out.

I watched her face as she listened, first confused, then disbelieving, then distraught. She felt, she said later on quietly to one of my friends, hurt by the "truths" we students told.

The woman occluded by the monolith of "Dr. S" never wanted her students and friends to be guilty of anything, and yet Dr. S the monolith made guilt an inevitable feeling. And we were okay with revealing in gory, cascading detail these moments because in erecting this monolith we'd forgotten that the woman underneath had no idea of our projections onto her, and did not want to know them. She couldn't bear that stature.

During the party, Dr. S mentioned being bowled over by the gift she'd been given by the parents of the young students, and though she was trying to find a way to thank them, it seemed so difficult. I told her, not knowing what compelled me, that it was a gift of love, and you can't ever thank people for their love, you can give love back in return.

All these years, this wonderful person had provided the woman's work of nurturing our souls, an ultimate gift of love for which we can't truly thank her. Thanks aren't enough. The only way to return this gift, this truly monolithic gesture, is to love her back.

And to love HER, the woman underneath the shadow of "Dr. S." Not the teacher, not the all-seeing sage (yes, one of the legends was that she knew everything that happened in the center, even when she was a million miles away). After being so considerate and welcoming to us, the least we could do is to provide space for her to be more than the behemoth, for her to be flesh and blood, not only capable of making mistakes (which we loved Dr. S for), but capable of being deeply exhausted, of being wounded and needing aid, of wanting passion, of sucking the marrow from the bones of life.

So I've started to try out calling her by her first name, her given name. It's the name she was known by for most of her life, the name her family and friends call her, and the name that will metamorphize my understanding of who she is.

It's part of growing up, to let go of the heroines and idols whose altars you've tended for years and years. But hey, it's only fair.

June 4th

2009-06-04T14:30:00.000-07:00

Today is the twentieth anniversary of Tiananmen.

I have family who were there that day, not in the square, but around, close enough to see the protests, and the response. I have family who tell, in quiet voices on secluded walks, the ramifications of seeing what they did, alluding to it once, and only once, because that was all that was necessary. I do not know details, but their silence itself is telling.

I cannot, then write about Tiananmen.

But I do remember one incident having nothing to do with Tiananmen and yet intricately associated with it. I was visiting my relatives when I was ten years old, having spent five years of my formative elementary education in the United States. My cousin, my "little brother" though he was barely six months younger than me, took me on the public bus to see the monuments and landmarks around town--the movie theaters, the parks, the river, the bridges. The memory of it is gray; his face is shadowed, his big eyes brightly darting. "There's a statue of Chairman Mao," he said, gesturing to an erect, noble bronze statue.

"Oh, I'm not interested in that," I say dismissively (it was de rigueur in my ten-year-old posse to affect, if not distaste, at least disaffection for everything the adults talked about, and yes the adults talked about Mao ZeDong, telling me to honor him because he transformed the country, and brought it out of darkness).

My cousin stared.

"Don't let anyone hear you say that," he said.

And I felt ashamed.

Though my interests mostly lie within the field of theory and American culture, questions of politics, hegemony, resistance, and so forth, it is merely because my past is too complex to disentangle in blog-sized pieces. Others may try to situate this in a wider political and/or cultural context, but I cannot; immanent in this is the condition of my liminality, the waverings I continually experience between identifying (wholeheartedly) with American culture and knowing that my past and my family history is just as integral for why I stand in the positions I do today.

This event is irreducible, and it would take infinite readings to parse out all the meanings it holds for me. In that sense, it contains many readings; it is rhizomatic (maybe I'm using that word incorrectly).

But my parents have always railed against the spin that American media puts on events in China. Maybe they are inculcated with nationalism, but I think it goes more than that. In a very concrete sense, the bias of the media elides the basic faith we have in the greatness of the country.

No, strike that.

China is a homeland, a motherland, a source. I particularly find the mother as a good construct for understanding how we feel about her--the very fact that she gives rise to us is the reason for our devotion to her; we are essentially tied to her by our very blood. Race is a construct, but for the Chinese heart it is an inalienable truth. Our race had been colonized, oppressed, exploited by Western countries and then by Japan. We have been raped and beaten, addicted to opium, paralyzed economically--the list goes on and on.

We, her children, are victims but also agents for recovery. The country as our mother demands unquestioning loyalty--as a Confucian principle. My father tells me never to question him in public, and even in private stares me down over the table. Merely because the country is tyrannous does not mean we do not love it wholeheartedly. There is an element of the sublime in this--awe and fear are mixed with love for the Leviathan, for the infinitely powerful sovereign. And yes, there is, like Foucault indicated, a continuity in this sovereign structure between the smallest to the largest structure of governance.

But all this is besides the point.

The silence around Tiananmen is not merely the state repressing free speech and protest. it is also a silence of commemoration. We do not talk about it in order to honor it, and in order to honor the country. Silence shows our love of the country. It is both a critique because we cannot celebrate the horror of the killings, and a memorial for the bodies of the dead. It is a silence because China has not yet recovered from the trauma of these last few decades. I would even propose that this trauma is ongoing. But as children in the hands of our mothers and citizens in the face of absolute sublimity, we are powerless to move, for movement and agitation is betrayal.

One thing you should understand, though, all you non-Chinese reading this, is that the nation of China, the country, the motherland, is not synonymous with the government. At least, not for me. For the country is vast and beautiful, but the government cannot stand in its methods of repression. But that's a topic for another day.

The power of the social gaze

2009-03-25T20:52:00.000-07:00

As an Asian female living in a predominantly white culture, I've found that my age (late teens) combined with my gender and physical attributes (race, height, size, clothing, etc.) has rendered me suddenly visible to the general male public. Several much older men have stared at me, approached me for my number, complimented me on my looks, as if I had no right to physical privacy. Well, perhaps privacy is only a right for the dominant social group, and merely a privilege for those in the margins.

A month ago, I walked into a bookstore and a man introduced himself to me; after some small talk in which he blatantly stared at me, he asked me for my name and number. The most startling part of the entire incident was not that he, a complete stranger, ogled my body or fondled my hand or whatever. The most startling part was that I was not afraid up until he said, when I said goodbye, that I should "remember to come back." And then my blood ran cold, and fear struck me, or was struck into me.

Why was I not afraid sooner? I'd thought he merely wanted to make conversation and was perfectly willing to talk to a new person. I was fascinated by the way he stared at me because I didn't know what he was thinking. But clearly I knew this was a dangerous situation, as I refused to give him my number and, when he asked for my name, gave him the wrong one.

The fear woke when I realized that this man was expecting more than just a conversation. That's when I ran. I told this story to two of my friends, who held me and comforted me. I had to deal with the fight or flight response. But then I told this story in brief on my facebook status message: my friends laughed, albeit ironically. Their quotes were "That['s] so cute!" and "Lol." Maybe I conveyed it wrong. Maybe I should've said something other than "I was fucking terrified." I get the sense they did not believe me.*

My boss sympathized when I told her about all the instances older men have hit on me--and the stark fear that I felt. As a child, this never happened--and for good reason: children are off-limits, not supposed to be culturally sexualized--but now that I've turned a certain age, I'm fair game. She, she said, has just passed the age when she is in the public eye. She has dropped into invisibility, and it was a relief, she said.

For me, this is a rude awakening to yet another instance of patriarchal oppression. Men stare; they ogle. Sometimes they do more than that, and it frightens me.

But then, sometimes, when I don't feel endangered, I find myself enjoying it. I become more aware of the way my body moves, bones, muscle, fat, skin. I perform the part of the Other. According to one of the drama theorists I read for Play Analysis, all it takes for drama to occur is for one man to walk across a room while another man watches. Suffice to say, without an audience, the thrill I get from being observed would not exist. And, as I live in a heteropatriarchy--even as it thrills, it simultaneously violates, as I did not ask for it.

I did not ask to be looked at, appraised, objectified. I am merely walking down the street, not displaying my wares--yet the social gaze compels me (forces me) into the role of performer. I suspect my enjoyment of this performance stems in part from a desperate need to gain control. At least as a performer, I have some sort of agency; I can consciously manipulate the image I present.

That begs a question: how much of my enjoyment is pure, inviolate? It can only be pure if it stems from a personal preference for performance. How can I take pleasure in performing, though, when all I do is serve the pleasure of strangers?

Feminist critic Laura Mulvey states in her paper "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema":

"In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split bewen active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its phantasy onto the female figure which is styled accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coed from strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness."

Herein lies the problem with thinking that my enjoyment comes from performance--even in performing I am playing to the heterosexual male audience--that is, my self-image is writ in white male terms. Nowhere else am I so aware of my nonwhite femaleness as when I am playing the role of a nonwhite female strutting; in doing so I may gain a illusory sense of agency, but there! Look! The insidious shadow of patriarchy, which beguiles hardworking feminists everywhere into complacency! I am performing to and for dominant culture, when I shouldn't have to. No, scratch that. When I shouldn't, period.

I reject compulsory sexualization. And yet every day is another struggle to keep respecting my body and my mind. Every day is another day grabbing scraps of my soul from patriarchy's clutches.

---

*This, this is why I am a feminist. Certain categories of people ARE NOT subjected to these situations--by pure luck, pure chance they are treated with respect for their bodies, have security from rape, autonomy... Because those with privilege do not see the terror, and thus assume it does not exist, or that we women, we oppressed nonwhites, are exaggerating.

Equality

2009-01-14T22:34:00.000-08:00

In "Evolution for Everyone" (Wilson), the book I'm reading for a science course, there is a passage describing how humans, in trying to breed a tame silver fox for their pelts, found that as the foxes grew to be more responsive and even desirous of human contact, they came to take on the physical characteristics of domesticated dogs--floppy ears, spotted coats, shorter legs, etc. The breeders selected only for the trait of tameness, and for nothing else--and it appeared that with tameness came these traits of change.

Wilson goes on to explain that domestic animals tend to share characteristics, ones indicative of an extended infancy. Since a baby mammal cannot defend itself and must rely on its parents, then submissiveness and lack of fear in childhood becomes an asset. Since breeders are artificially manipulating the mammals' evolution, selecting for submissiveness, the mammals that are more submissive reproduce--and in fact, all our domesticated animals "have become tame by retaining their juvenile traits" (45 Wilson).

But see, we don't just infantilize other species. We do it to ourselves.

Years ago I read a poem by Marge Piercy, "A Work of Artifice." Though by no means a brilliant poem, it has a simultaneously sharp and gentle point, like a quick blow from a soft hand.

The end of the poem goes:

"It is your nature
to be small and cozy,
domestic and weak;
how lucky, little tree,
to have a pot to grow in.
With living creatures
one must begin very early
to dwarf their growth:
the bound feet,
the crippled brain,
the hair in curlers,
the hands you
love to touch."

Piercy's subject is ostensibly the bonsai tree, which we humans carefully trim to fit the plant into a tiny pot instead of letting it grow unfettered in the wild. She is also, rather obviously, comparing this sort of monitored trimming to how society culls the minds of women to keep them dwarfed, bound, crippled--that is to say, to infantilize them. Sexist thought and behavior keep women weak and prevent equal relations between men and women. Obviously the sexism of one man who prevents his wife from making decisions, going to school, or doing anything besides occupying the space of a human ornament has effects not just on the wife or her husband, but on all who associate with the wife, and all who associate with the man, and (god forbid) on their children.

As a (radical?) feminist my assumption is that men and women are the same excepting their gonads--that there isn't any "natural" (by which I mean biological) basis for the assumption that a woman's mind is any weaker than a man's. Thus the parts of our society which lead to the infantilization of anyone--especially women, who make up much of the margin--are despicable. These elements keep women from even acknowledging their potentials by not demanding very much from them, and suppressing or ignoring their achievements.

But if the infantilization of women is despicable, what about the deliberate infantilization of animals? We humans do not consider other animals to be our equals. We find ourselves at the top of the pyramid, reclining as royalty, and every other living organism is Othered. We love dogs, we love cats, we love all manners of animals which we keep in cages or on leashes. We reward those that are affectionate and submissive, and punish or neglect those who aren't.

We farm animals. We kill them. We eat them up, and use their bodies for our purposes. We toy with them.

Karen Traviss wrote a fantastic series of science fiction novels that explored the idea that every form of life, whether or not it is "sentient," is to be respected, its environs preserved. That just because we can't understand another species' form of communication does not mean that they aren't entitled to freedom. Just because they do not possess the same rational faculty we do should not make them our slaves, our property.

So how far do we take this? I don't know. Humans are in the midst of mastering the planet. All our expeditions for knowledge, our sciences, our research--everything leads to our eventual control over our habitat. Knowledge, darlings, is power. Instead of working with the land, most times we only slash things into the shape we want them to be in, showing at best indifference to the rights of other animals, while the majority of activists pontificate about preserving forests for stone-age tribes still living in the highlands or what have you.

If concerned citizens do think about animals, it's in terms of "preserving" the environment for them, or "protecting" them. We are always in a patronizing position, superior to other animals. Even if we "share" the land, we do not remember that it was theirs in the first place. If ancestry implies a right to the land, the fauna of any area we did not originate in have far more right to an environment or ecosystem than we ever will. If it doesn't--what does? What allows us to just take and take, to sink our fists into delicate ecosystems and shake up the sediment, upend the structure?

Does that make any sense?

I'm not sure what I'm arguing for, besides a sense of humility when we as humans approach ecosystems. Death is inevitable, and power-structures unavoidable--I am not advocating for vegetarianism, or veganism, or any particular way of life. I'm not saying that we should treat animals as equals, as if they could do the same things we do, drinking and philosophizing...

I am advocating a different point of view. If we kill and use live animals, let it be with a set utilitarian purpose in mind. If we eat meat, let us be aware that what we consume was once alive, once felt sensations taking hold of its entire body, once breathed and watched and heard. And if we breed animals for traits we prefer, let us do it with a sense of responsibility. If humans merely disappeared one day, what would happen to the domesticated animals that depend on us? Many would perish. Is that fair of us to let this happen? What I mean is, let us as a whole be respectful of the living.

Discourse on Dreaming

2008-12-12T00:39:00.000-08:00

In Psych 101 I studied the current theory of sleep, which states that there is than one phase of sleep--there's REM sleep and non-REM sleep. Vivid dreams happen in REM sleep, which only happens for 90-120 minutes a night (according to Wikipedia), and in one night of uninterrupted sleep about four or five phases of REM sleep occur. Thus, in one night more than one dream can occur.

In the middle of "Waking Life," Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke's characters are talking about sleep--how in one minute of sleep you can have a long, intricate dream that leads down several corridors and spans numerous hours. The experience of dreamtime is longer than "realtime." I've enacted plotlines stretching through days and weeks of unbroken dreamtime in ten minutes of rest.

But then, if dreams expand our perceived or experienced time, then isn't dreaming a way of extending our lives? We only have so much time living--merely a blip in the grand scheme of "things." That is to say, we are mortal. If dreaming can be construed as just as "real" an experience as living (and a dream is just as real, to me, as a movie or a book)... then isn't dreaming a way also to achieve immortality?

Second Law of Thermodynamics

2008-12-02T18:57:00.000-08:00

My perspective has always wavered between optimistic and pessimistic. Lately it's been waxing towards the latter: I've been especially focused entropy--or really the second law of thermodynamics, the universal law that entropy is increasing. I'm using to explore a related idea--that loss of potential energy (every sort of energy, be it physical, psychological) is increasing.

It feels like the world is coming apart at the seams--that we're barreling in slow motion from a state of innocence into a state of irretrievable loss. Light pollution, for example: the artificial light humanity generates bleeds into the night sky, drowning the stars and disrupting the life cycle of other animals.

It's not that previous eras of existence were necessarily better than ours--but in terms of the state of the world, I perceive the past to be more pristine, more beautiful and complete, than the prospective future, and I see this as universal. I see this as a motif occurring everywhere.

I know, universality is outdated, modernist, a figment invented by the dominant cultural discourse.

Still, strangely, that's the thought I keep returning to. Birth is more pristine than death, and we start from purity (whatever hue purity is, though white seems to be its stereotypical color) and descend into sordidness six feet under.

There may exist cycles in life. We start out trapped within the womb of our mothers, we end enclosed in the wet womb of the earth. Perhaps it is just an accident that womb and tomb differ by one letter: I don't have the time or energy to look up the etymology of these two words. I know I'm trapped within a Western perspective that sees everything to be an expulsion from Eden, or a Descent into hell, or a Fall from heaven. Light is constantly changing by shades into Darkness.

But, I tell myself, remember that in the Bible, after God created the world, "the earth was formless and empty, and darkness was over the form of the deep" (Genesis 1:2, NIV). As a text, the Bible is instrumental in identifying and understanding our cultural paradigms. These two processes go hand in hand, if they are not already equivalent to each other. By naming the darkness we come to terms with it.

Even in this rambling I sot my Western assumption that Waste is Dark, Loss is dark and Negative. What is positive, and what negative? I mean this in the metaphysical sense; by positive I don't mean "happy", but something that has reality, substance, matter. Stating something positively is not trying to see it from a "happy" perspective, but to give it a quality rather than to take one away.

Why must Loss be connected to the Dark? I see how Loss is connected to Negation (and negativity in all its forms), but can't Loss be constructed positively, if we begin from a state of innocence? If innocence is formlessness, then its loss must be correlated to pure experience.

I'm not sure where I'm going with this, thus I think I'll stop.

Back to entropy: we cannot use the energy we've lost. We cannot regain time that has passed, the chances that have slipped away. Life is full of choices, and apathy/indifference is a choice as well (though some choices are admittedly involuntary, and we cannot exercise complete control over our selves). I am not my own master--but I try. Everything we do, we do at the cost of something else: there is no such thing as a free lunch. Diversion: In economics, this has to do with opportunity cost. In choosing anything, we are giving up something else. In selecting to go to the library I've lost the ability to make it home for dinner. The opportunity cost of choosing A is the worth of the best option (B) we've foregone (let go/done without) in order to secure A.

We cannot do anything without losing the chance for something else, and because of my assumption of the linear nature of time, that loss is irretrievable.

I'm watching the bones of my hand tensing against my skin as I'm drumming my fingers against my keyboard. It's quite disturbing and beautiful all at once. I am a machine of a sort, an assortment of parts and cartridges put together so that the mechanics of the world, its physics and biology, can send my thoughts out among people.

When I think entropy, I think of constant loss. We cannot avoid irreversible loss.

A friend posited that if loss is constant, so is gain. Obviously gain is not constant the way loss is... but irretrievable loss exists, and it is equivalent to death, and there's nothing to be gained from death--gain is nowhere near as powerful as loss.