Two Books

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A photo posted by Terra Leigh Bell (@leighandharriet) on Aug 8, 2014 at 6:28pm PDT

            Two books, very different.  Though both were crafted replies to other writers.
            The first — first in chronology as well as psychic weight — is Beltenebros, or the Beautiful Obscure.  This is my first book of poetry, and it was released by Seattle's Babel/Salvage at the end of August.  Beltenebros is a (short) book-length poem.  It was written in direct response to Cervantes' Don Quixote de la Mancha; I think of it as sort of "talking back" (albeit with a great deal of affection) to the novel(s).*

The book finally got finished! #papercraft #paperart #handmadebooks

A photo posted by Terra Leigh Bell (@leighandharriet) on Nov 11, 2014 at 9:10pm PST

            The second, though it got finished around the same time, is quite different.  It is a very small, handmade object.  Each page contains "memorabilia" from either Lemuel Gulliver's journeys in Jonathan Swift's 18th-century novel, or from my own journeys, or some of each.  It took much longer than I'd expected, but I have to say that I'm pleasantly surprised by how it turned out.  There are a couple of pictures in this post, but if you click through to my Instagram account, you can find images of all the pages.

                    _______________________________________________________


            I wish I could remember more clearly.  Like most children, I did various art projects when I was little.  And I'm sure that, also like other children, some of my experiments prompted my mother and other grown-ups to say, with a mix of pride and puzzlement, "What is it?"
            I wish I could remember exactly how I felt about that question.  I suspect it doesn't bother kids as much as most adults worry it does.  I vaguely remember feeling pleasure.  Not because of their interest, but because, in realizing the adult didn't recognize what my picture was an image of, I could tell them whatever I wanted.  A dog could suddenly be claimed as a giraffe.  A tree could become a boat.
            I like the adult version much less.  Now people say, "What is it about?"
            In the last few months, each time I have told a person that my first book was published, or that I made a handmade book/art-ish object, I have heard the question, "What is it about?"
            I can think of two appropriate responses.  I could launch into a long analysis of all of the themes and shapes and recurring images and all the layered meanings in Beltenebros.  I could talk about memory and materialism and my highly clichéd but nonetheless thriving romance with the sea in the Gulliver's Travels book.  That's one way of responding that seems as least reasonable.
            Or I could shrug my shoulders and say, "I have no idea."  This seems most honest.
            But I am just as socially assimilated as the next schmuck, so I politely say something like, "It's an homage to Don Quixote/Gulliver's Travels."  Blatant relief sweeps across their face as they realize A) it's not sexual, and B) the fact that it is "about" books they haven't read lets them off the hook from having to feign interest.  They (equally politely) reply, "Oh, I haven't read it."

#papercraft #paperart #handmadebooks

A photo posted by Terra Leigh Bell (@leighandharriet) on Nov 11, 2014 at 9:15pm PST

            The reason I think all of this matters is simple:  I caught myself.  I caught myself being more proud of having had Beltenebros published than I was of finishing the handmade book.  And if I dig under that pride a bit, I realize that my pride in having a book published stems from a sense of validation.  Having someone — anyone — choose your poem or novel or essay collection to send off to a printer's and slap an ISBN on it feels like "someone" — that conveniently vague notion of the rational capitalist at the back of everything — has put their stamp of approval on my work.  Receiving that stamp of approval permits others to grant theirs as well.
            But...really???  Have you seen some of the  books to get published recently?  I know I'm showing some of my elitist colors here, but "getting published" (and the passivity of that phrase should probably bug you) says nothing of the artistic value of a, um...book.  What it tells you is something about its capitalist value; that Babel/Salvage and many, many publishing houses like it are so clearly labors of love, doesn't change that fact.
            For the time being, I'm not going after this so much as an attack on capitalism "out there," so to speak, as I am concerned about the ways capitalism and consumerism have clearly shaped my own mind.  I care deeply about human creativity, and any ideology that fucks with the underlying structures of our individual minds and the consciousness of our larger societies to such an extent that we value the approval of the market more highly than our own inner compass should disturb me.  It should disturb me often enough to actually do something about it.  Maybe I could start with being proud of having written the damned thing.

                    _______________________________________________________


            As I mentioned in my last post, the move to Portland has been tumultuous, and I can't currently locate my copy of Don Q.  But in the next couple of weeks I should be able to put up a couple of posts that show some of what I did in working with Cervantes' text.  If you're curious, you can search for "quixote" in the upper left-hand corner to see a couple of short excerpts, as well as some of my thoughts on the novel and my process in general.
            As always, feel free to comment, and thanks for the patience in my transition to Portlandia!



* Today if you go to your local bookstore (my favorites being Elliott Bay in Seattle and Portland's Powell's on Hawthorne), you will find the single book Don Quixote de la Mancha.  I only think it worth mentioning that it was actually two separate books written by Cervantes because the two are quite different, and writing the second book probably contributed to Cervantes' decline in health.  He worked his ass off to get the book out partially because so many copycats had published spurious second volumes to his original, and he wanted to set the records straight.

5 Options for Artists that Aren't Really

Lists are popular.
“10 Best Pick-Up Lines Ever!”
“8 Reasons Your Marriage is Already Failing!”
“5 Ways Parents Can Stop Insulting their Childless Friends!”
I am super into being popular, so I thought I’d create a list, too.  Well, actually, it’s just to get some things off my chest.  I am working on a post on vocation and profession, and I kept getting bogged down responding to all of the old men who, over the course of my life, have felt it incumbent upon them to offer me unsolicited life advice.  Honestly, though, these things still get said, both to me and to some of my artist friends.  Typically in a much more well-meaning way than they used to be offered, but without exception they come from folks who are not artists themselves.
So in the interests of clearing my throat before I get to my post on vocation, and because these points bring up REALLY important issues around capitalism, here are my 

5 Things Non-Artists Need to Stop Saying to Artists

1. Oh, you’re a poet!  Have you thought about being a professional writer?  Like, advertising copy, or journalism, or something?

So I’ve used poetry and writing as my examples, but the same goes for all art forms:  an actor doing TV commercials; a musician playing for a recording studio; a painter doing video game illustration.  The thing non-artists do not seem to get is that your passion, and the skill you acquire expressing that passion, are two separate things.  Using the skill you’ve acquired does not satisfy the passion.  Not one tiny bit.  If I do journalism — and I have, as it so happens — it is no closer to writing poetry or my own essays than is cleaning toilets (which I have also done, and found far easier on my creative side than the supposed creativity of paid writing).
Also, there’s money in journalism?  Are you fucking kidding me?

2. There are jobs for artists.  You could be a college professor!  (Or any type of teacher.  Acting, painting, photography, composition, etc.)

Actually, now that I think of it, this one has a similar problem to #1.  Namely, teaching is a completely different job.  It is not satisfying to creative urges to teach artistic skills when what you want to be doing is painting giant abstracted oil paintings inspired by Victorian novels.
Also — and this is important to the quality of our art, folks — as a professor, I would spend over half my time reading poetry written by 18- to 22-year-olds.  I know what I wrote between the ages of 18 and 22.  I promise you:  reading it would not make you a good artist, of any stripe.  So professors are forced into filling their heads with incredibly heartfelt drivel.
For another thing, in order to get a job at the college level, you have to be willing to move pretty much anywhere in the country.  So, you know, just don’t fall in love with anyone or ever, ever want to settle down and have a family.  (Seriously on this one.  I’ve known people who speak multiple languages, who’ve been moving around the country or the world for over ten years, trying to get tenure.)  Also, going along with that one, 76.4%.  That’s the percentage of professors, across all institutional types, that are adjunct and not tenured or tenure-track.  That means no guarantee of a job next year, and most likely no benefits, and now (and where are those insane tuitions going??!!) most are reported by a recent study to be living below the poverty line.
And finally…  There are no jobs!  Not even crappy ones in the middle of nowhere!  Our parents’ generation is holding onto their tenured jobs for dear life, and there has been such a massive explosion of 30- and 40-somethings with graduate degrees in the humanities that some of my professor friends have told me they are seeing upwards of 100 to 300 applications for every ONE job that comes available.

3. You're making excuses.  There are people out there living their dream.  You could be one of them!  You just gotta be committed!

You wanna know my dream?  It’s so, so simple:  permanent American expat, traveling from one gorgeous, fascinating place to another (Paris!  Lagos!  Kuala Lumpur!  Istanbul!), spending my days writing poetry and essays, painting with media I don't even know the names of, and my nights drinking with other fabulous expats and going to operas, ballets, musical performances, and art openings, and sleeping with so many gorgeous men I finally lose count in a blissed-out, orgasmic haze.  That’s all!  And you know what, the non-artists are right about one thing.  If I was more committed — say, committed enough to marry some rich prick who wanted a tall, blonde trophy — I could totally finance my dream.  So why am I so lazy?

4. Well, but look at [insert famous person with buckets of money]!  He/she certainly seems to have figured it out.

Okay, just for clarity’s sake:  Rick Steves is not an artist.  Neither is Heather Graham.  Neither is Mandy Moore, nor Dan Brown, nor Thomas Kinkade.  Neither are a hell of a lot of other people that Wikipedia will happily label “writer,” “actor,” or “artist.”  They are entertainers.  Pure and simple.  They make crap, so we can all stop thinking for a few minutes.  Nothing against not thinking.  I’m a regular meditator.  It’s just, if you’re going to try to turn your brain off, don’t call it art. Now, that being said, there are artists, across all disciplines, who to all appearances support themselves financially by making wicked art.  Tilda Swinton is a goddess.  Rose Wylie.  Philip Glass.  Arvo Pärt (be still my heart).  Lupita Nyong’o.  Michelle Ndegeocello.  Adrienne Rich.  Anna Netrebko (*sigh*).  Lang Lang.  They are out there.  But here’s the thing:  most had money at their back, and if not money, artistic parents.  No American ever wants to admit this to themselves, but the pulling-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps myth is largely that.  And for the one in a billion artists who do manage to do that?  Can you not tell that I am far too much of a pessimist to be that one? Did you read the above article I linked to? Read it.

5. (In response to an artist voicing concern over balancing art with marriage and kids.)  Sure you can have it all!  Lots of artists have homes and families!

I saved this one for last because this is tough for me to address.  Not because I have a stance against it.  Lots of talented artists do purchase homes and have transportation and get married (and stay married!) and have kids who don’t hate them or kill people.  It’s not that it’s technically impossible.  It’s tough because how to balance art-making with family life is a legitimate problem for a lot of people. It's a question of priorities and sacrifice, and I find that generally, non-artists whip this one out way too casually.
When you have a child, you understand responsibility in a whole new way.  Your very identity gets changed.  But the problem is, it probably won’t be 100% changed.  So an artist may suddenly see their old, artistically active self as selfish and focused on petty things, and simultaneously resent their children for keeping them from their old selves.  As a woman, I tend to hear more about this from the perspective of moms rather than dads, but I can tell you:  there are some moms out there who both desperately want to hold their babies, and desperately want to throw them across the room and run off to somewhere, anywhere, where they can be their artist selves again.  Somewhere they can not be a mother anymore.
These are not “bad women.”  They are not necessarily bad mothers.  Any responsible adult can and should figure out how to deal with their own disappointment once they’ve brought a child into this world, and buck the fuck up.  Most (that I have seen, anyway) do just that.  But at what cost?  How many ways can a human be split?  And is it such a great thing?
  The major advantage I see to encouraging everyone to do everything is productivity.  Yes, my life would look much more impressive if I published books, made art, studied philosophy, and bought a house and had babies.  So?  Why the obsession with production?  Oh!  Right!  Capitalism!  I always forget.  Right, totally need to get on board with capitalism, and its fixation on making more and more, so we can consume more and more.  Return to Go.
And this is the meat of the matter.  Americans want to believe the aforementioned pieces of advice can work because we really, REALLY want to believe that capitalism can be done in such a way that it doesn’t hopelessly contort each and every soul it touches.  I am showing my so-far-left-I-don’t-know-where-the-leftists-went colors here, but yes, capitalism distorts and taints everything.  Everything.  And everyone.  This is why Beyoncé — whom I instinctively want to fall down and worship — is still a problem.  This is why we should never, ever indulge in regretful surprise when we hear what the pace and demands of capitalism do to creators (click here for one example out of thousands).  Americans want to believe that it is possible to be the most authentic version of themselves possible, within this system.  I assert that it is not.  It is not possible.I speak mainly as a poet here, but there is no way to slice the cake that doesn’t hurt me and my creativity.  The solution I have arrived at — and I make no claims that this is the best solution, only that it is no worse than any of the others — is to protect the space my creative urges come from as much as possible.  For me, this means never, ever placing responsibility for things like food and shelter on their very fragile shoulders.  (Huh.  My creative urges ended up with shoulders.  Metaphors are weird.)
I could go further and get all Žižekian, but as I mentioned earlier, this is mostly a throat-clearing exercise.  Of course, there are probably at least five more silly pieces of advice I could come up with, but these are the main ones that continue to re-assert themselves.  And there are real potential pitfalls to the option I’ve chosen.  For one thing, I think it’s awfully easy for folks like me who choose to (attempt to) keep their art and money as far from one another as possible to get awfully self-righteous (a particular talent of mine). We can fool ourselves into believing that somehow we manage to accomplish what everyone else fails at; namely, that we somehow stay free from capitalism’s dirty fingers.  We do not.  Also, there’s a scary psychological potential here, which is that if not one dime ever comes to me via my art, given that I have a psyche shaped by the belief that money is the primary marker of value, it’s often (read:  always) difficult to remember that I am in fact an artist. This one hurts, and it's a constant problem for me, but again, that's part of my point: there isn't a solution within capitalism. Which means that the solution is... (Raises eyebrows...) Yes...???

A highly biased, anecdotal, and personal framing of why I think free will is bullshit

            When I was in kindergarten, a little boy sat across from me who, I now realize, was Black.  But for whatever reasons — probably mostly to do with lack of contact — it didn’t actually register to me that he “was” anything other than a little boy.  I was definitely aware of his skin (the term rapturously gorgeouscomes to mind).  But other than his darker skin tone (and skin tone is a big hang-up, but it is not the sum of the notion of race), I didn’t see him as being anything other than a friend.  In fact, I think if someone — some wise grown-up — had tried to explain to me that we were different, I genuinely wouldn’t have understood what they were trying to say.  (Cue heart-warming “innocence of childhood” music.)

            But then I got older, and somewhere along the line it changed.  I couldn’t put my finger on it, but the moment I remember noting the change was when I was fourteen years old, and my mom had brought me to my new high school, in a different neighborhood of a city that was entirely new to my family.  The memory goes like this:  “Every single kid on the front lawn of the school is Black.* <pause> Holy fuck.”  I was, to be perfectly honest, terrified.  I was so, so scared.  Everyone dressed differently than I did, they talked differently, they were listening to different music, they even had a distinct language of gesture and movement.  Even the volume of speech felt intimidating.

            Now, if someone — another wise grown-up (all grown-ups seem so sure they’re wise, this could be just about anyone) — had stepped in and tried to explain to me that those Black kids and my uptight White ass were, in fact, not really different at all…  That all the things I was getting hung up on were surface-only, I would have looked at them with all the pity that misguided grown-up deserved:  Of course we’re different! Can’t you see how much has changed?!

            All of this is about perception.  When I was five, I genuinely did not perceive race in the little boy across from me.  When I was fourteen, I most certainly did.  Race.  Not color.  Race is a whole package of stuff, and it had taken root.

            Now if just perception — just the ability to see what there is in front of you, and then to interpret it, and to make evaluations about its relationship to your own existence — if just perception can be so deeply and subconsciously infiltrated and shaped, I can see no way forward to accept an idea of “freedom” which isn’t so heavily curtailed by chronology, geography, religion, race, gender, able-bodiedness, class, etc., as to become a moot point.

            I should note that in the grown-up world of philosophy, there are much better, more subtle responses to questions about free will. I think my favorite so far is what's called the reasons-responsive view. But the reasons-responsive view is so sensitive to the forces at work around and within an individual, I actually think it significantly deviates from what most people are talking about when they insist that they have free will. Most people who like the idea of free will seem to conceive of themselves as origin points, where new energy and direction is generated ex nihilo, and they make "rational" "decisions"***. They evaluate things. They look at the world with open eyes and minds, see what's there, see their options, and form opinions based on reality.

            Even the examples used to illustrate choices on websites like the IEP show these sorts of blind spots. Allison is considering taking her dog for a walk. Will she choose to do so, or choose to stay inside and take it easy where it's warm and dry? In the kinds of examples used by every philosophy textbook and internet explanation-generator I've ever seen, no account is taken of the complex of childhood, self-definition, fear, hope, laziness, self-loathing, and vague qualia-of-the-moment that is any given human being in a given instant. If we take into account all of these factors, and take into account that these shaping/directing factors are in fact part of the agent in question and not somehow external to her, the question of whether or not her decision-making process is free begins to feel a bit silly.

            I guess I'm harping on about this because I genuinely think that there are still a lot of people out there — granted, probably mostly White dudes, but those White dudes still hold a lot of sway — who think that this is how they and their fellow humans work. And this, frankly, worries me.

* This is a memory which, I now know, must be edited. There were huge contingents of Latino, Filipino, and Afghani kids, and even a significant minority of white kids. My brain, either in the moment or later on, filled in what were non-black faces (but also non-white, and so confusing to a simple this-versus-that racialized brain) with the scary faces that I at least felt I "knew" what to expect from. My experience with — and indoctrination about — kids from Latin America, the Philippines, and Afghanistan was so limited, my guess is that my brain just used them as a blank canvas to paint something on.**

** Yuck. This "being honest" shtick is making me look bad.

*** Hmmm... I quite like putting decision in quotes.

Interwebbing

            Yes, it's official:  I am leaving Facebook.  The reasons are most likely obvious.  Everyone I talk to about it sighs, nods their head knowingly, and says something like, "That's great.  Good for you.  I wish I would do that."  Note that there is never even a smidgen of sarcasm.
            We are tired of Facebook.  Granted.  But Facebook is certainly not the entire internet.  Why, for example, do I not feel a comparable need to leave any of the other online time-sucks, which include...

• Google+
• Twitter
• StumbleUpon
• Instagram/6tag
• Tumblr (mostly for following other people; I don't blog there)
• Anthropologie website (shopping; by which I mean lusting)
• J. Crew website (ditto)
• Kate Spade Saturday website (*sigh*)
• Blogger (reading other people's blogs)
• And bouncing around the internet, trying to stay roughly appraised of the happenings (and discussions) in pop-culture-land.

            So, first off, I should totally stop going to websites like Anthropologie and Boden and tormenting myself with all the shit 1) I can't afford, and 2) I don't need.  This one will never, ever be good for my sanity.  On the plus side, I just threw away years' worth of fashion magazines and catalogues because it finally felt like an organic, "I'm ready to be done with this now" kind of moment. On the down side...well, Anthropologie just keeps making gorgeous stuff!

            But there is something different about all the other social forums.  This may be just me, but for some reason, I feel  the distance in the other formats much more clearly.  In other words, no part of my brain (no part of which I'm conscious, at least) thinks I'm genuinely connecting with other human beings when I'm on Twitter or Instagram.  But every once in awhile I'll get a serious personal message from a friend on Facebook, and most of the people on there started out as friends.  Friends.  Not "Friends."  Remember those?  Friends were people I saw, on a regular basis, and formed genuine connections with.  People I may even hug when I see them.  I realize I may be in the minority on this, but I still follow a basic rule on Facebook:  I do not "friend" someone unless they are someone I would want to have coffee with.  I think my stand-offishness is weird to a lot of people, but "a lot of people" also insist that smiling pleasantly is a reasonable response to strangers asking me how I am.  (Hint:  They're wrong!)

            My point is, when I'm on Google+, Instagram, Twitter, etc., I am there thinking, "I am incredibly smart and talented.  I have a blog. I love my blog.  I think people should read my blog.  I want to read other blogs, and participate in their conversations.  How do I keep my readers, join in the discussion, and find more people who would enjoy my writing?"  I've even started just creating usernames like @leighandharriet, because frankly, Terra Leigh Bell — the human being, who goes by that name, reads lots of books, and agonizes over her hair color — that person is not on the internet.  Because — and I really don't mean to sound bitchy, just pointing out something that seems to get lost — the internet isn't exactly something I or any other material being can be on.  It's not a material object.  I can't stand on it.  Or in it.  I am a physical being with mass.  The internet, not so much.  It's a gigantic, almost spiritual entity created only by connections.  It exists in connections.  One could argue that, as humans are relational, we also exist in connections.  But throw a person in solitary confinement, and while you will certainly break them, you will still have a body in front of you.  Cut all the computers of the world off from each other...well, then I guess I could stand on a computer?

            Facebook, for me, elides these distinctions in a very uncomfortable way.  Sometimes I'm on Facebook as Terra Leigh Bell, Friend.  Here's how that looks:  I bop around, see if any friends have changed their relationship status (because I'm clearly SO connected to them if I find out they've gone through a breakup that way, right?), look at my funny friends' status updates, marvel at how little of anyone's humor I understand, click on friends' links to read several articles written by left-wingers ranting about how incredibly stupid everyone on the right is (and in the terribly-written, politically-simplified, ideologically-bent, gramatically-butchered process, convincing me that the authors are just as bad), get angry at the world, bounce back to a friend's page, say something friendly, and finally turn on some Beyoncé and go to Anthropologie.com to calm myself down and fantasize about the life I will never have (and would find fault with if ever I did).

            Awesome.

            Then, sometimes I go to Facebook as Terra Leigh Bell, the Pseudo-Activist.  This is when I get on my high horse about the things I genuinely care about — animal rights, statism, religious bullshit, military bullshit, police bullshit, and women-specific issues — and go to Facebook just to post links and read other people's links, and "like" pages in the hopes that by clicking on my little laptop I will get all the captive sea mammals of the world miraculously released and left alone by our loathsome species.

            Tilikum is still in his nightmare, and probably will be until he dies.  I'm thinking more concrete action might be required.

            And then sometimes I go to Facebook as Terra Leigh Bell, the Writer's Agent.  It's a little hard to explain the difference here.  I think a lot of writers and artists have a hard time promoting themselves, and I do get that difficulty.  I guess the way I'd explain it is to say that I really stop being myself.  I start being my own agent.  Because I genuinely think I'm talented, and a good thinker and writer, and I REALLY want people to read my work, I'm pretty happy to post links to my blog, and talk about my forthcoming book from Babel/Salvage.  But I have to step out of myself a little bit to do this, and frankly, it feels icky to step out of myself in a forum where moments earlier I might have been pm-ing a friend about some serious parenting issues or arguing about the role of religion in feminism.  Those are personal matters with which I feel intimately and passionately connected.

            Promoting my blog requires me to step one or two paces away from myself, and for whatever reason, I am always one or two paces away on all other internet channels.  I'm not sure why.  Maybe it's a sign of something being wrong with me (though I doubt it).  Maybe I will hurt someone's feelings by saying this (though I also doubt that).  Whatever the reasons, I don't like the weird in-between space that is Facebook.  I don't like noticing that a friend has suddenly removed all photos of their (now former?) partner, and then looking at an ad for Amazon.  It makes me a little sick.

            For awhile, I thought I would stay on Facebook and just try to take those steps back there as well.  After all, it is a major mode of communication these days, for everything from a running group I recently joined, to doula and midwifery organizations.  And it's not that I don't want to be in touch with these people.  It's just that I want to actually be in touch with them.  As in, we see each other in the flesh occasionally.
            Recently, I had a bit of a realization:  the final evidence that Facebook is not functioning as a genuine social connection (for me at least).  I suddenly realized that I never talk about my boyfriend on Facebook.  Some of my friends that I don't see very often may not even realize I have a boyfriend.  And I suddenly noticed that I wasn't mentioning him on Facebook because it felt gross.  Like I was dragging this beautiful, precious thing in my life into some kind of advertising-mixed-with-aching-human-loneliness muck.  Which made me realize — Facebook is a muck of advertising-mixed-with-aching-human-loneliness.  Sometimes it's disguised as hipster irony, sometimes as intellectualized distance.  It's still aching, and it's still alienated as hell in the modern world, and why did I ever think Facebook didn't contribute to the alienation again?
            So for those of you who didn't know, yes, I have a boyfriend.  His name is Michael, and he's awesome.  He's also Jewish, and an Atheist, so Christmas was interesting.  And he is such a gorgeous gift in my life right now, I have no desire to drag him into that muck.
            And for those who follow my blog, thank you for reading, and I will continue to post links to new posts on Google+ and Twitter; feel free to follow me in either of those spots.  Also, you can subscribe right on the homepage (I think the link is in the right-hand margin).  It says "subscribe in a reader," but you can also just subscribe via e-mail.  The official Salvation from Facebook day is probably either New Year's Eve or New Year's Day.  I'll keep posting reminders until then.  I definitely don't want to lose readers (and so far, the vast majority of my traffic comes from Facebook, so this is something of a scary move for me), so I'll do whatever I can to take readers with me.

φιλοσοφἰα, γυνἠ, part two

Continued from an earlier post, on October 18th.


I'm spending awhile explaining where I'm coming from (in case that wasn't obvious from the aforementioned post). All of this is a very long-winded way of announcing that I am planning on moving into more explicitly philosophical territory. Philosophical, as I define it. I'm explaining my interest on a more personal level, because on the surface the term "Philosophy" comes off as specialized and, frankly, elitist. But the term, and the action of the heart and mind are, I think, very different.

            Philosophy is a word for something I originally turned to out of alone-lonely.  But then I got distracted from it by sex, and found a new kind of lonely:  I call it "man-lonely."  Lots of women know this lonely.  It's not so much wanting men, as it is the discovery that you don't get to choose either to be with them, or to escape them.  It's men who refuse to leave you alone, and even being a bitch just gets you followed around and yelled at for being a bitch.  (Trust me; I experimented.)  Alas, in my desperation to make the alone-loneliness stop, I mostly failed to be a bitch and went for super-sugary-sweet-and-nice and I held onto those assholes, goddammit.

            Fast-forward several years, and several miserable relationships later.  I am in a bookstore.  There's a book with a lovely cover.  It's called Philosophy, and I think to myself, "I remember when I used to like philosophy.  Before I dated men who like philosophy.  I remember when I thought I was smart.  Before I dated men who corrected me."  And I buy the book.  Mostly because the cover is nice, the layout looks like it's meant for laypeople, and the editor's name is pretty:  David Papineau.  The number of books I've purchased for similar reasons, and then never read, is huge; so I figure this one will have friends.

            One week after said book purchase:  I got in an accident.  My beloved Vespa betrayed me, crushed my foot, and removed a noticeable portion of my epidermis.  I was unable to walk for three months.  Suddenly, I had a lot of free time on my hands.  I couldn't fill it with work or men or anything.  Mostly I alternated between crying over my broken heart (I had also just been through [what I sincerely hope will be] the breakup to end all time), and crying from the physical pain I was in.  So what was I going to do with all my time?  I mean, I'm a champ when it comes to sobbing, but even I was getting tired of it.  Hobbling around on crutches was excruciating for reasons I won't go into due to the ick factor, so I basically had a forced three-month-long reading break.

            So there was this book.  And it was pretty.

            And I felt sick.  Sick from trying to crawl away from myself — from my own intellect and creativity — in an effort to be less intimidating to the men I was sure wanted to make me happy.  After all, they kept saying so!  "All I want is to make you happy and take care of you."  I'm pretty sure I thought that if only I could crawl fast enough away from myself, some guy would finally be able to give me all the love and happiness they kept promising.

            Which leads me to the second Greek word in the title of this post.

            γυνἠ: gunē.
Woman.
Because, finally, it is beginning to sink in: no human being can simply set aside their specificity in order to engage with the upper echelons of creative and intellectual achievement. I used to believe such non-specificity was possible. As a German-American who grew up surrounded by Jews, I was desperate for non-specificity. As a white girl who briefly lived in a part of California where I was one of the only white kids, I've been shocked to discover that most white Americans don't grow up with nearly the ethnic consciousness I always had. If you are one of those white Americans, I guess you're lucky. I guess that's what we mean when we talk about privilege.
When I was at university, and anti-feminists insisted that anyone was welcome to the philosophical tradition, that anyone could engage with the Western literary canon, everyone was welcome, it was an open book available to all, if only those women/blacks/Jews/gays/Latinos/whoever would stop whining about their differences for long enough to engage with the tradition, we could all realize how much we all had in common — I wanted to believe them so badly. I did believe them. I chimed right in.
But when I was finally angry enough at the way men had treated me, angry enough at the story of boy meets girl, boy loves girl, and they get married and he takes care of her for the rest of her life, when I was finally angry enough to have not only been lied to, but to have helped build the lie, when I was finally angry enough to push back, I can tell you specificity still mattered.

So here we are. For the past year or so, I've been reading Plato. Almost nothing but Plato. And, um, why is this blog here? Oh, yeah. It was supposed to be a space for me to think out loud about what I was reading. But honestly, I haven't been thinking out loud about a lot of what I'm reading, because I keep having all these thoughts that seem — *ahem* — specific. They are specific to being a woman, and specific to a post-colonial historical moment. They are specific to being a German-Scottish-French-American, and therefore both supposedly part of the tradition by ethnic descent, and awkwardly insecure about where our rebellious, anti-aristocracy, money-obsessed colony fits in with that tradition. And maybe more than anything else, my thoughts are specific to being an uncomfortable-yet-still-devout Christian, which is so incredibly out of fashion in philosophical circles as to silence all but the most confident (or naïve) thinker and writer.
Nothing I'm saying here is exactly new. Feminists and queer theorists, at the very least, have been saying it for at least a hundred years. But after all the miserable relationships, and confused and confusing teachers, all the Hollywood movies I believed without knowing I believed them, something even better than the bookstore happened: I suddenly found several men in my life who are probably better feminists than I am. They seemed to believe in the value of my thoughts and creativity, and also (to my surprise) were pretty sure I should be pissed off at having been silenced in so many ways, some subtle, some not so much. Like, spitting venomous, fire-breathing unicorns kind of pissed off. Maybe I should have been able to get there on my own. Maybe I should have been inspired by a feminist or two. (Okay. Maybe one. Or two.) But however it happened, it happened. I got lucky. I found out that the issue with men and women in this world isn't that men are mean and women are pure and innocent victims. It's much more complicated and difficult and interesting than that.
So while it's true that nothing I'm saying here is entirely new, I think I got tired of not saying it, in my own words.

golden age or churning of the waters

            It is late Pentecost, and approaching All Saints' and All Souls', and my church is doing a pop-up blog.  The following is a piece I originally wrote in response to something in the mass — though I can't recall what it was anymore — and so I thought it appropriate to contribute it when asked if I could offer something.  The following went up today, so I thought I'd share it here as well.

golden age or churning of the waters

the peach            sliced in half            fell open

gladiolas            stuck out their tiny            purple tongues

and strawberry blossoms            by magic            became strawberries

still your doubts hover            swoop in

and out             follow

an unknown will            behind me

behind me            behind me

where oh where

                                did the fruits with

their sugar and petals go?

it was that spring            the one people talk about

but it's gone            and somehow you know

you were never there for it

up under the mind            come floodwaters in the night

dark            and rotting what they touch

get behind me

i see it coming            and suspect

i am less necessary than you

behind me            where

shall we wait            for the boats that won't come

for the turtles            lumbering and snapping their mouths

to float us            towards a different death            one followed

by a spring            we may never see

            The concept of a “golden age,” from what I’ve read of world history, seems to be nearly universal.  There is always, “back then, when everything was great.”

            I am tired of this idea.  Not because I don’t believe in a golden age, but because I believe that almost by definition it must have been before human memory as we know it.  On some level we know deep, deep in our brain, the hunter-gatherer we are, and will never be again.  All of civilization — all the beautiful architecture, all the art, all the music and poetry and mercantilism and supposed glories of the intellect — seem to me a symptom of the degradation of our species.  A falling away from what we are, what we evolved to be.

            A bleak view for a Christian, I know.  We are such optimists!  Such unrelenting believers that all will turn out well.

            I present no solution to this.  Please don't take what I am about to say as a solution.  It is entirely possible there is none.

The churning of the waters comes from another mythology:  Indian/Vedic.*  So too the turtles.  They represent a moment when the muck that came out of Shiva’s destruction was churned, and lo!  There were good things hiding in that mud!

What the good things are, I don’t know.  I suspect they don’t include me as I know myself now; I suspect they are made from my recycled innards.  But I would like the turtles to have a chance to float a new world on their backs, even if they do it on the strength of fish they ate, who in their own turn gnawed on my bones.

*  I should mention that I do not understand Indian or Vedic philosophy well enough to expound on it/them (really there are Indian schools other than Vedic, but it's the best known).  I will say that I think that poetry is a different realm altogether, and I claim full license to do whatever the hell misunderstanding I please in poetic form.  I would work much harder — and probably write something much less useful — if I were composing an essay on soma and the samudra manthan.  Which I'm not.  Yet!

φιλοσοφἰα, γυνἠ, part one

            φιλοσοφἰα
            Philosophia.  The original meaning is "love of wisdom."  That's a lovely original meaning.
            I go back and forth on the term "philosophy."  For now, I am happiest with the phrase, "the life of the mind."  Philosophy has started to sound so cold, and what drew me to the life of the mind (originally) was much, much more personal.  It was an aching loneliness, that started sometime in grade school.
            So here, for the next two or three posts, I will stories centering around two different words.
            First, a chronology.

            Long time ago:  Somebody writes the fucking book of Genesis, which is one of the better pieces of literature.  But strange once you read the really old creation myths.  In which the reader discovers that most of humanity believed that the world was created by a goddess and a serpent, and the whole dude thing didn't show up until much later.

            Approximately 1933-1945:  Shoah, or the Holocaust.  Or the really brilliant PR concept, the Final Solution.  During Shoah, probably around 6 million Jews were killed by Nazi programs in and around Germany.  If we broaden to "the Holocaust," and include in that all of the religious dissenters, homosexuals, Romani, disabled, and other lives deemed unacceptable by Germany, the number rises to about 5 million more humans, for a total of approximately 11 million people dead.

           1991:  I started attending the public junior high in Mercer Island.  I lived on Mercer Island, but until then my mom had driven me to another nearby town to go to a small Christian school there.  Because I hadn't been going to the public schools where I lived, I hadn't known much about the demographics of my own neighborhood.  One of my first discoveries was Jewish kids.  Lots of Jewish kids.  I was initially thrilled to discover that the Hebrews of the Bible had survived in the modern era.  I had thus far believed them to be extinct because we always talked about them in the past tense in church and school.
            I was, however, quickly apprised of the events of the Holocaust.  Being raised in an Evangelical home and church, with a heavy emphasis on guilt, and being mostly German American, the results were fairly predictable.  Not least because — and this itself was probably due to the historical influences on Mercer Island's ethnic composition — everyone my age was obsessed with ethnicity.  When you were meeting a peer for the first time, you would exchange names, ages, and would immediately be asked something like, "Where is your family from originally?"
            If I'd had any sense, I would have said I was Scottish.  My last name is Scottish.  But I am predominantly German, and compulsively honest.  So when the inevitable, "What ethnicity are you?" came up, I couldn't stop myself from saying "German."  The responses were less than favorable.  Usually it was just a quiet "Oh," and they would suddenly be not interested in being my friend.  Once, I got a horrified, "You're a Nazi."  Luckily even then I saw some of the silliness of this.  (Some.)  But it didn't change the fact that my family's origins shaped my whole social experience of junior high.  And, perhaps most importantly, I knew it.

            What got me interested in philosophy — probably between the ages of thirteen and fourteen — was neither the supposed topics, nor any interest in a method of questioning.  It was weirdness.  My weirdness.  Weirdness, and its requisite alienation.  It was being an outsider, having no friends to eat lunch with at school, and every time I did try to talk to my peers I was terrified by how casually they seemed to take life, and how seriously I took it.  You could call it being uptight, on my part.  And also, loneliness.

            At the church I went to in high school, the pastors were fond of expounding on "the roots of words."  These were mostly botched attempts, which frequently conflated the history of the form of a word, with the history of its meaning.  The word "sin" is a great example of this.  Or the etymology of a word — say, "woman" — would be used the prove the accuracy of the same ideology which gave rise to the word in the first place.

            Eventually, in college, men discovered me.  The supposed consolation of human companionship was mostly supposed; still, I was distracted from philosophy, from my newly discovered smarter-than-thou status, and thought I had found a cure for my isolation:  sex!
            Still the loneliness continued, and I discovered many of the real reasons so many women are suspicious of men.  And being intellectual does not help.  Most intellectual men want a woman who will "Ooooh" and "Aaaahh" to their fascinating observations, and less intellectually oriented men seem to resent the idea of a female companion being smarter than them.

            Philosophia is a beautiful word, with an important original meaning.  These days, it feels like a word for something out of reach.  Every time I use the word "philosophy," I feel like I'm in a Monty Python skit and the skies should pop open with a booming voice:  PHILOSOPHY.  I dig Monty Python, but such antics make me feel awkward and unfunny.  Not so much inspired to join in the conversation.
            But this feeling isn't an accident.  It would appear that the only way to get called a "philosopher" is to go to a university and get a doctorate.  Now that is a very, very expensive way to read books, write papers, and sit around discussing them both.  But academicians keep encouraging us to view philosophy as a highly specialized field, because why else would anyone be willing to spend that kind of money or, more realistically, take out loans they'll be paying off for the next thirty years?
            It remains to be seen if this trend will change for the better anytime soon.  I am encouraged by a lot of what I hear/read going on outside of the academy; for example, at Partially Examined Life* and at Philosophy Bites**, whose own Nigel Warburton recently left the academy because he isn't so sure it's the best place to do philosophy anymore.  But I'm not convinced this exactly heralds a sea change.  Both Philosophy Bites and Partially Examined Life focus almost exclusively on responding to the same people and topics that are dealt with in the academy.  It's not that I think the academy has it wrong about the importance of the philosophical literary tradition and its foci.  It's just that I'm not sure when we can expect to see non-academicians coming up with original, well-articulated ideas that are taken seriously enough to make it to some kind of larger discourse.  Unless/until that happens, it seems we are stuck with the academic model, both in terms of what subjects are discussed, and which interlocutors are taken seriously.




*  Which is awesome, by the way.  Totally worth checking out.
**  Which is also awesome, and much more succinct.



            

A Warm and Fuzzy Post, that Isn't

            Thoughts on Chapter 9 of The Artist's Way.  Part nine of twelve on creativity.


          "Symptoms, then, are in reality nothing but a cry from suffering organs."  - Jean-Martin Charcot

            Oh, the myriad ways to come undone.  There are, of course, the "real" diseases — cancer is popular these days, and of course heart disease — and then the less-than-tangible organs make themselves known, don't they?

            Somatization disorder is a long-term (chronic) condition in which a person has physical symptoms that involve more than one part of the body, but no physical cause can be found.

            The pain and other symptoms people with this disorder feel are real, and are not created or faked on purpose (malingering).*

            Alcoholic neuropathy is damage to the nerves that results from excessive drinking of alcohol.

            The cause of alcoholic neuropathy is debated. It probably includes both a direct poisoning of the nerve by the alcohol, and the effect of poor nutrition associated with alcoholism. Up to half of all long-term heavy alcohol users develop this condition.**

            Even depression is getting its day in the sun, thanks to the invention of happy-drugs.  After all, if there's a drug to make the problem go away, it must be real (and surely must also have been accurately described by those making millions off of it).

            The chapter for Week 9 of The Artist's Way has to do with compassion.  As with many other chapters, I remain ambivalent about much of what Cameron has to say.  I should warn folks who haven't read it that Cameron is fond of telling stories about how as soon as Joe started taking his art seriously he had a million people loving his work and throwing money and opportunities at him.  So I take her with a grain of salt.  Still, the takeaway on it is simple:  being your own enemy doesn't work out too well.  For creative work, or for just attempting to be human.

            Self-loathing manifests in more ways than I care to count.  But even calling it "self-loathing" feels inaccurate.  When we say self-loathing, I think we imagine someone sitting by themselves with phrases like, "I hate myself," "I'm so worthless," and "Maybe the world would be better off without me" running through their head.  And don't get me wrong:  people do this.  Believe me.  I date them.  It's a fucking blast.

            What I'm talking about is the generally endemic self-rejection which we all engage in all the time.  To some extent, I suspect (pessimistically, I grant you) that self-rejection is necessary to socialization.  After all, there are so many emotional reactions and counteractions going on in our own heads and hearts, in any given minute of the day, that we simply couldn't interact with others if we didn't suppress some of the internal noise.  Add in a vague notion of sin/shame, a dash of consumerism, and you get America.

            And to this, Cameron has a response which I know was difficult for me, and would probably be difficult for a lot of people:  affirmations.  The Artist's Way uses or recommends the use of affirmations on a regular basis.  And while I shied away from the idea initially, Cameron makes an excellent point towards the beginning of the book:  why on earth is it considered not only normal but expected for us to regularly say hateful things to ourselves — i.e., "You're always late and you know everyone's pissed off at you for it."; "You're never going to get it together and stop incurring NSF charges, are you?"; etc. — but we think it's super weird to say something nice to ourself even if we know it's true?  What on earth is so bizarre about saying to yourself every once in awhile, "You know, sometimes I write/draw/build things I like."  Or, "Yesterday I got up on time and had plenty of time to do tons of stuff during the day.  I bet I could manage that again."  Or whatever.  Why is this weird?

            My short answer is that self-love is weird because we believe that it is 1) necessary to reject the failing parts of ourselves in order to see positive change, and 2) a sign of resiliency to be able to survive the onslaught of rejection.  Of course, we're not surviving the onslaught.  If a world characterized by young women starving/sexualizing/smiling themselves to death, and young men drinking/drugging/earning themselves to death, can be described as surviving, you and I don't live in the same world.  If the soul is dead, you have not survived.

            The mind will find a million ways to make itself, and its pain, known.  And the path back to wholeness within oneself is, I suspect, not short.  But the only way forward on it is, at some point, to give yourself a break.  All failures, all repeated dysfunctions, are one pitiful ego's attempt to protect, provide, and care for you.  It's like, the hardest working part of your whole head, and you just keep finding ways to insult and belittle it.  So my only recommendation this time around for creative health, is to give yourself a fucking break.

*  "Somatization disorder."  Medline Plus.  National Institute of Health.  Web.  12 September, 2013.

**  "Alcoholic neuropathy."  Medline Plus.  National Institute of Health.  Web.  12 September, 2013.

Postscript:  In all seriousness, if anyone's ever interested in reading a book or two about genuinely reconnecting to yourself, less from a warm fuzzy position and more from a position of calling bullshit on self-hatred, I highly recommend Sharon Salzberg's Lovingkindness: the Revolutionary Art of Happiness.  My favorite story is when she is nearly assaulted by a drunken man while traveling in Calcutta.  Afterwards, she told one of her sweet, loving, peace-filled teachers about it, and he said, "Oh, Sharon, with all the lovingkindness in your heart, you should have taken your umbrella and hit that man over the head with it!"